News stories from Monday July 25, 1977

Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:

There will be no further investigation of Bert Lance's personal or business finances by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, which had been concerned with certain aspects of the Director of Management and Budget's private financial dealings when he was a banker. The committee agreed with Mr. Lance's contention that there was "nothing improper" in his financial affairs. "You have been smeared from one end of the country to the other, in my opinion unjustly," said Senator Abraham Ribicoff. Mr. Lance's testimony before the committee will be sent to the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is conducting an inquiry into the conditions of a $3.4 million loan Mr. Lance received from the First National Bank of Chicago. [New York Times] President Carter charged that criticism of his administration's record on blacks and the poor damaged "the hopes and aspirations of those poor people." He made this known privately to Vernon Jordan, the National Urban League's executive director, who said publicly that Mr. Carter was forgetting the black voters who helped make him President. The President, in a speech to the Urban League at its convention in Washington, said that he welcomed criticism but had no "apologies to make" for his record. [New York Times] The nation's oil companies may have overcharged consumers by billions of dollars, a Federal Energy Administration task force reported, and the F.E.A. announced an intensive audit of the 15 largest refiners starting in about three months. John O'Leary, the agency's administrator, cautioned that no wrongdoing had yet been proved and that the companies may be cleared. [New York Times] Corporate earnings reports continued. Gulf Oil reported that its second quarter net income was up 3.8 percent on a revenue improvement of 11.6 percent. However, net income in the year's first half slipped 5.9 percent, though revenues were 12.8 percent higher than a year ago. [New York Times] The tax practices of Gulf and Western Industries have come under wide examination. Important questions about G.&W.'s tax policies are now also being asked by a number of government agencies. One of them has to do with the reason for the removal of the tax files of Paramount Pictures, a Gulf and Western subsidiary, from its Manhattan offices to divisional offices in Stamford, Conn. The New York Times, in a four-month study of Gulf and Western, interviewed many former company officials who said that the records had been moved because the company's senior tax officials feared that a thorough audit by the Internal Revenue Service of Paramount's tax records -- particularly with those dealing with transactions abroad -- would find evidence of dubious dealings. [New York Times] The stock-price rally that started six sessions ago was cut short when the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 9.18 points to 914.24 in moderate trading. The average had gained more than 21 points since July 15. The decline was broad-based as losers outnumbered gainers 952 to 470. Doubts about the strength of the economy and the conversion by some investors of recent gains into cash stopped the rally, brokers said. [New York Times] A shaky cease-fire seemed to have cooled the dispute between Egypt and Libya. The government of Col. Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, studied a series of Egyptian conditions offered through Algerian and Palestinian mediators. The Egyptian conditions were based on a demand for the removal or mothballing of complex electronic surveillance systems that Soviet technicians have built on the Libyan side of the border between the countries, sources in Cairo said. Another demand by Egypt, it was said, was that Libya refrain from political "agitation" in Egypt, the Sudan and Chad. [New York Times] The 16-year-old Albanian-Chinese alliance seemed to be in jeopardy with the report that Albania had asked China to remove its technical experts who came to Albania when it broke relations with the Soviet Union in 1961. Diplomatic sources in Belgrade said the request was made through the Chinese Embassy in Tirana after about 50 Albanian students had been withdrawn from Chinese universities. The trouble started when the Albanian Communist Party paper denounced China for moving toward the United States and for failing to keep Marxist-Leninist ideology pure. [New York Times]

Stock Market Report

Dow Jones Industrial Average: 914.24 (-9.18, -0.99%)
S&P Composite: 100.85 (-0.74, -0.73%)
Arms Index: 1.48

	Issues	Volume*
Advances	470	4.43
Declines	952	13.27
Unchanged	453	2.73
Total Volume		20.43

* in millions of shares

Arms Index is the ratio of volume per declining issue to volume per advancing issue; a figure below 1.0 is bullish.

Market Index Trends
Date	DJIA	S&P	Volume*
July 22, 1977	923.42	101.59	23.11
July 21, 1977	921.78	101.59	26.88
July 20, 1977	920.48	101.73	29.38
July 19, 1977	919.27	101.79	31.94
July 18, 1977	910.60	100.95	26.89
July 15, 1977	905.95	100.18	29.12
July 13, 1977	902.99	99.59	23.16
July 12, 1977	903.41	99.45	22.47
July 11, 1977	905.53	99.55	19.79
July 8, 1977	907.99	99.79	23.82