News stories from Tuesday September 20, 1977

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

A federal bank official disputes statements by Bert Lance and Donald Tarleton, head of the Atlanta office of the Comptroller of the Currency, that Mr. Tarleton acted on his own in lifting an agreement on strict monitoring of the Calhoun (Ga.) First National Bank prior to Mr. Lance's appointment as Budget Director. The bank official told Internal Revenue Service investigators that Mr. Tarleton had said last February that Mr. Lance had specifically asked him to take that action on Nov. 22, shortly after Mr. Lance told him he was to be appointed. [New York Times] President Carter's energy program suffered a new setback when the tax on fuel-inefficient automobiles died in the Senate Finance Committee. Although the program went through the House of Representatives almost intact, it is being swiftly. dismantled in the Senate. While the final version emerging from a House-Senate conference may be stronger than what the Senate approves, the continuing weakening of the package is likely to affect the outcome. [New York Times] A slump in nuclear reactor manufacture in this country, from an average of 30 orders a year to three in 1976 and four so far this year, two of them tentative, is threatening the future of the industry. An officer of Combustion Engineering, one of the manufacturers, predicted that the industry would disintegrate in about two years with the scattering of skills and production capability developed since World War II. [New York Times] Stock prices, helped by some last-minute buying, closed mixed in moderate trading. The Dow Jones industrial average closed at 851.78 points, up 0.26 for the day. [New York Times] A crisis in Youngstown, where the virtual shutdown of Youngstown Steel's Campbell Works will cost roughly 12 percent of all jobs in the Ohio city's basic industry, is expected to cripple the region's economy and set off a migration of steelworkers to other areas. It is an unusually dramatic version of a general trend in aging Middle Western industrial cities. [New York Times] The chairman of Sharon Steel, the nation's 14th largest steel company, and his son and daughter were accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of charging more than $1.7 million's worth of personal housing, services and travel in corporate aircraft to companies he and his family have controlled. It filed a complaint in federal court in Washington stating that in each year since 1970, companies controlled by Victor Posner, his son Steven and his daughter Gail Cohen had paid thousands of dollars each year in personal expenses unrelated to business. They have agreed to repay $600,000. [New York Times] Births to girls in their teens are up slightly, along with the illegitimacy rate among girls in the same 15-to-17 age group, at a time when both rates are down among older women and when contraceptives and abortions have been increasingly available. A government study of these figures for the last decade said that the trend was "puzzling." [New York Times] Vietnam was admitted to the United Nations when the General Assembly opened, with a record 105 countries joining in sponsoring its application. The admission of Vietnam and the former French colony of Djibouti raised the total membership to 149. Lazar Mojsov, Deputy Foreign Minister of Yugoslavia, was elected president for the 1977 session. [New York Times] Moshe Dayan has hopes that a formula can be found to overcome obstacles to a Middle East peace conference, possibly this year. The comments by Israel's Foreign Minister at a Washington news conference pleased administration officials who said there were reasons to believe that his talks with President Carter and others had produced more favorable results than had expected. Mr. Dayan acknowledged that wide gaps still existed between Israel and the United States as well as between Israel and the Arab countries. [New York Times]

Stock Market Report

Dow Jones Industrial Average: 851.78 (+0.26, +0.03%)
S&P Composite: 95.89 (+0.04, +0.04%)
Arms Index: 0.85

	Issues	Volume*
Advances	583	7.19
Declines	748	7.80
Unchanged	538	4.04
Total Volume		19.03

* 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*
September 19, 1977	851.52	95.85	16.89
September 16, 1977	856.81	96.48	18.34
September 15, 1977	860.79	96.80	18.23
September 14, 1977	858.71	96.55	17.33
September 13, 1977	854.56	96.09	14.90
September 12, 1977	854.38	96.03	18.70
September 9, 1977	857.07	96.37	18.10
September 8, 1977	868.16	97.28	18.29
September 7, 1977	876.39	98.01	18.07
September 6, 1977	873.27	97.71	16.13