February 22, 1993

Even as Japan racks up the largest trade surpluses in history, the flood of international investments that the surpluses were supposed to finance have declined sharply in recent years, undercutting one of the Government's justifications for the imbalances. The Japanese Government has taken a variety of steps to blunt criticism over the overwhelming size of its surpluses. One of the more important of these, during the 1980's, was the development of multibillion-dollar programs to "recycle" some of the money to needy areas of the global economy. The Government sent funds to areas of the developing world that were starved for capital and encouraged Japanese corporations to make productive investments in the United States and Europe.

Usually, as these National Basketball Association All-Star Games go, there is more of a jovial atmosphere than an intense one. Seriously, how intense can a game be when one team scores 153 points, as the West team did last year? The players show up, have a few laughs, pull a few gags, sign 10,000 autographs, play some ball and go home. Not this time.

Into an age of Raiders jackets, X caps and Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts as ubiquitous as Lyme ticks comes the license plate with attitude -- both political and fashionable. And like all good modern symbols, it costs extra. By midyear in the New York metropolitan region, motorists with a social conscience or simply the need to decorate their cars will be gazing at each other's logos or slogans of choice on plates lauding professional sports teams and regional tourist areas (New York), ocean beaches and wildlife (New Jersey), or the recently marketed Connecticut tags that encourage preservation of Long Island Sound.

A NEW HOME (IN NEW YORK) FOR LETTERMAN CBS has bought the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway to serve as the new studio home for David Letterman, making it certain that his late-night show will continue to be produced in New York after he switches to CBS from NBC this summer, CBS officials say. The deal, which was concluded on Saturday and is to be announced this morning, includes the 14-story office building adjacent to the theater. CBS paid about $4 million and expects to pay "several million more" for renovation, said Edward Grebow, the network's senior vice president of operations. A1. NEW YORK CITY

Nobody is cheering the arrival of new taxes, but many voters here say they accept what seemed so hard for voters to accept during the glory days of the 1980's: that new taxes are simply necessary. President Clinton's appeal to patriotism and a sense of national need is not taken lightly by people like Jim Seros, a restaurateur visiting from Detroit who declares, "I know it's going to cost me a little bit, but that's O.K.," or Steve Nudelberg, a 32-year old telecommunications executive in Miami, who says, "I'm in an income bracket where it actually affects me dramatically, but I'm a firm believer that at some point somebody's going to have to sacrifice."