August 31, 1994

SORRY, "Doonesbury," President Clinton is not the first world leader to be caricatured as an item of food: a century and a half ago, the hated King Louis Philippe of France was savaged as an overripe pear. The image stuck, and in French "pear" became slang for "fathead." If you read a newspaper that doesn't have comics like "Doonesbury" and wonder what this is all about, for 10 days the strip has been portraying the President as a breakfast waffle. Straight-cornered, not soggy from syrup, the waffle at first chatted with a well-dressed aide who appeared to be Joshua L. Steiner, the Treasury Department functionary who disavowed his damaging diary about the White House's handling of the Whitewater affair.

As information technology stocks continued their recent surge yesterday, shares of one of the companies riding the rally, the 3Com Corporation, reached an all-time high. For a midsized computer networking company with a name little known beyond Silicon Valley, the milestone might seem to deserve only passing mention. But for 3Com, which less than four years ago was teetering on the brink of extinction, with its shares trading below $6, yesterday's closing stock price of $68.25 and its intraday high of $69.125 signified a remarkable technological turnaround.

In an effort to better compete with larger rivals in electrical equipment and telecommunications, General Signal and Reliance Electric agreed yesterday to merge in a stock swap valued at $1.3 billion. A combination of the two similar- sized companies -- with products ranging from turbine pumps to fiber optic systems -- would have total sales of $3.6 billion. The merged companies would have a larger presence abroad and would would have greater purchasing power with its vendors, analysts said.

Reshaping the Arms Industry A merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta would reshape the arms industry. The $10 billion deal continues a steady drumbeat of takeovers and mergers that has grown only louder as the Pentagon's budget declines in the post-cold-war era. [ Page A1. ]

As the underwriting of junk bonds has begun to cool this year, some Wall Street firms are aggressively moving into a business that until now has been the preserve of commercial banks. Call it junk loans. In recent months, Merrill Lynch & Company, Lehman Brothers Inc., CS First Boston and Goldman, Sachs & Company have raided the ranks of the commercial banks, hiring away executives experienced in the art of putting together corporate loan packages and assembling groups of banks to put up the cash.