A LOOSER GRIP….

The International Monetary Fund seems ready to support another $4.5 billion loan to Russia. A Fund official mumbled his blessing: “We see sufficient success on the part of the government and the Central Bank in relation to those measures which we agreed on.” The country’s largest firms may be handed over to the president’s cronies, but so eager is the Fund for a pretext to support the loan that Dow Jones reported, “the Duma’s approval of a luxury-car tax and of a bill to restructure banks more quickly may have paved the way.” Yeltsin is likely to veto the car tax when the bill reaches his desk.