Corporations

The Clinton administration has finally settled on an election-year strategy for exploiting popular concern about corporate irresponsibility without resorting to any new government programs to change business behavior. Instead, administration officials said Tuesday that President Clinton and his aides will use the "bully pulpit" to praise examples of good corporate behavior.

Corporate Lending Falls 21% in 1st Quarter: Bank loans to U.S. companies slowed in that quarter amid a pause in lending for mergers and acquisitions. Banks arranged $143.9 billion of loans for U.S. companies in the first quarter, 21% lower than in the same quarter last year, according to Loan Pricing Corp.-Gold Sheets, a New York firm that tracks the loan market. Still, the first-quarter lull in corporate lending is expected to be short-lived.

L.A. Fiesta Broadway has worn many sombreros over the years: cultural event, free concert, street party, family fun day, and in one unfortunate year, violent melee. But the nation's largest Cinco de Mayo celebration has bounced back from that low of two years ago. In fact, as the seventh Fiesta Broadway gets ready to roll on Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. in downtown Los Angeles, it's taken on a new identity as a hot corporate marketing vehicle.

U.S. companies so far this year are paying out more of their profits in the form of dividends to shareholders, with the number of companies increasing their payouts at a 15-year high, Standard & Poor's Corp. said this week. S&P said 590 U.S. companies increased dividends in the first quarter, the most since 1981 and an 8% increase over last year. In addition, there were fewer divided reductions or omissions in the first quarter than since S&P started keeping records in 1956.

In an electronics laboratory in the heart of Watts, Gilbert Ybarra and his classmates are learning the difference between analog sound and digital hi-fi stereo and figuring out how to take VCRs apart and put them back together. They are mastering college applications and collaborating on new classroom rules when the old ones don't work.

Corporate mergers have roared ahead in the first days of the second quarter, prompting Wall Street experts to predict another record year for mergers and acquisitions. Although some merger specialists previously doubted that 1996 could top 1995's record, the blockbuster pace seen in the year's first three months has quieted the cynics.

Though still in shock, Parsons Corp. and a dozen other companies began on Thursday the somber job of filling the voids left by the deaths of their senior executives who were killed along with Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown in an airplane crash in the Balkans. The executives included Leonard J. Pieroni, the 57-year-old chairman and chief executive of Pasadena-based Parsons, a leading provider of engineering and construction services worldwide.

In Richmond, Va., a federal jury Monday found systematic discrimination against black employees by electronics retailer Circuit City Stores Inc. In Chicago, a year-old age-discrimination suit just spawned a new charge of racial bias in layoffs at the major printing firm of R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., prompting the Rev. Jesse Jackson to intervene last week. In Los Angeles and Houston, black workers at Shell Oil Co.

Rowland Schaefer, chief executive of Pembroke Pines, Fla.-based retailer Claire's Stores Inc., did something last week that newspaper companies everywhere can only hope is the start of a trend. Schaefer bought a quarter-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to say, in essence, that he didn't know why his stock has sunk. "As you all know," a frustrated Schaefer wrote in an open letter to shareholders, "Claire's Stores shares have suffered a dramatic decline in value during the past two months. . . .