July 31, 1994

HERE'S how I know there's going to be a long baseball strike: Cleveland. This is true. Cleveland is having such a delightful season, after all these years, that something ghastly must surely interfere. Even a wild-card entry into the playoffs would set up the most important series in Cleveland baseball in 40 years. The prospect is so heartwarming for a city that has suffered so much that I just know the owners and the players are going to blunder into a strike that could kill the season.

The United States has found an unlikely benefactor to replace Japanese investors in paying for the nation's continuing budget and trade deficits: foreign government banks, mainly in developing countries. The flood of money from these unlikely sources into the United States is the latest shift in the powerful currents of capital flows that underlie the global economy. In the 1970's, Arab nations flush with oil money recycled their profits into American investments.

A FRIEND has never used those brightly colored golf balls because, he says, even while they're resting on the green they look as if they're rolling. The same can be said of red sports coupes. Even when parked in the driveway, they seem to be moving.

THE first state "lemon laws" were passed a dozen years ago, to provide legal remedies for consumers with relatively new, problem-plagued cars that are not fixed after repeated repair attempts by a dealer or manufacturer. All 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, now have such laws. Most states currently cover leased cars as well as purchased vehicles, and New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island cover certain used cars as well.

After four decades in a Fifth Avenue mansion that would not look out of place on the Place des Vosges in Paris, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has a contract to buy a set of institutional buildings near Union Square. The 85,000-square-foot complex, which has been home and headquarters of the American Foundation for the Blind, includes two four-story neo-Georgian structures on West 16th Street, between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas, behind which are a 12-story loft building and a four-story building on West 17th Street.