October 6, 1992

Individual investors have rarely had it so tough. With low interest rates tarnishing the value of safe investments like certificates of deposit, investors scurrying for yield have turned increasingly to the stock market -- only to get another sharp reminder yesterday that equities are a very volatile investment. The sharp selloff in the market yesterday, which drove the Dow Jones industrial average down as much as 105 points before a rally cut the loss to 21.61 points, underscored the troubles the market has seen in the last three weeks. Since mid-September, the market has fallen continually, giving up about 200 points as of yesterday.

Ask about the "free market" or "reform," and people out on these fertile South Russian plains still begin to snarl. But ask about the price of wheat or the cost of fuel, and the animated patter tells a different story. A year after the Government began to wean agriculture from the hugely inefficient Soviet system, some tender new shoots of market are appearing in the hardened old collective farms, the kolkhozes.

The Mexican Government voiced confidence today that Gov. Bill Clinton's qualified endorsement of a North American Free Trade Agreement had cleared the path to its approval. Mexican business leaders who support the accord were openly euphoric. After a week of steady increases, values on the Mexico City stock exchange leaped 64.63 points, or 4.65 percent, on the news, closing at 1,454.35. It was the market's second-largest gain this year.

Ross Perot's return to the 1992 Presidential campaign has been greeted with overwhelming hostility by American voters, leaving the contest fundamentally unchanged, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll. Gov. Bill Clinton holds a persistent lead over President Bush as the campaign enters its final month. Mr. Perot, who briefly surged to the top of some polls last spring, has a remarkably negative image in the new survey, with 80 percent of the people who once supported him but no longer do saying they do not trust him.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan yesterday accused a Chinese Government agency of conspiring with a subsidiary in New York to evade United States quotas on clothing imports by falsely labeling thousands of jogging suits and pairs of blue jeans. Yesterday's indictments in Federal District Court charged the China National Textiles Import and Export Corporation, which prosecutors said was the agency in charge of textiles and clothing trade, with conspiring to defraud the United States. It was the second set of indictments in a broad 17-month investigation by the Customs Service into Chinese textile export practices.