May 26, 1992

A year ago, as the nation returned to work from the Memorial Day weekend, officials in the Bush Administration and at the Federal Reserve, as well as a significant number of private economists, were trumpeting the end of recession and predicting steadily improving growth through the summer. Twelve months later, the oratory sounds remarkably the same. Michael J. Boskin, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, said last week, for instance, that the White House would soon raise the growth forecast of 2.2 percent it made in January. Robert Parry, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, predicted that growth into 1993 would be around 3 percent. And through a leak to The Wall Street Journal last week, the Fed informed credit market participants that it felt further easing of monetary policy was not necessary for a moderate recovery.

From the doorway of his formal-wear shop on Fulton Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Mortimer Roett has seen a lot of change in 25 years. The surrounding streets, once home to crumbling brownstones and empty lots, are lined with freshly painted doorways and small apartment buildings. The old milk-bottling plant across the street has been turned into a six-story commercial complex with a supermarket, banks and a theater. And though many merchants have come and gone from the bodegas and boutiques around him, Mr. Roett and his business have prospered.

The question of giving condoms to students, which provoked a bitterly emotional struggle in New York's public schools last year, is now being taken up by the city's elite private schools. In the last year at least four schools -- Brearley, Dalton and Friends Seminary in Manhattan and St. Ann's in Brooklyn -- have agreed to make condoms available. Several others are reviewing the issue.

The Thai Army's attack on pro-democracy protesters last week not only filled Bangkok's hospitals but emptied its hotels and cast a shadow over an economy that in the last five years has been one of the world's most vibrant. Yet in some ways, what is most striking about the mood among economists and business executives interviewed in Thailand last week is not their concern -- natural enough after bloody street fighting was televised around the world -- but their cautious optimism that the economy will be bruised but still buoyant.

Once best friends, now quarrelsome enemies, Microsoft, the nation's largest software company, and I.B.M., the largest computer company, are edging toward a much wider war. The battlefield is the heart of the International Business Machines Corporation's market: the data-processing centers of Corporate America. The Microsoft Corporation, which dominates the personal computer business, has invested $400 million and spent five years developing an operating system -- the software that controls computer operations -- that may make it a force in commercial computing and the fast-growing work station business.