DESPITE the Administration's drive for freer trade, the Department of Agriculture has decided that it must ask for a boost in tariffs on wool imports until it can find some way to pare down the 100 million-lb. domestic surplus the Government had to buy under its support program.

BUILDING costs are heading downward. Pacific Northwest lumber mills, feeling the pinch of Canadian competition, have cut prices as much as 25% in the past year. In Oregon and Washington, more than 150 lumber mills are so overstocked that they have curtailed operations or closed down entirely.

DESPITE the price dip in natural rubber, which has fallen 4-c- a Ib. since May to a 3 1/2-year low, tiremakers will not cut their prices. Reason: they expect forthcoming wage hikes will more than offset the savings in raw materials.

TRADING stamps, the little stickers good for prizes that merchants gave away with purchases in the '30s, are back again in a big way. Atlanta's Southern Stamp Co., which has signed 500 merchants for its stamp plan, expects to have 1,500 before long. In the Rocky Mountain states, where the craze started up again two years ago, it has already reached such proportions that one Albuquerque supermarket manager complains that he is now "in the stamp business instead of the grocery business."

ALTHOUGH a truce has been announced in New England's pipeline battle between Northeastern and Algonquin Gas, Northeastern's boss, H. Gardiner Symonds, may upset it. Symonds had agreed to let Algonquin, stopped by a court injunction, share half the New England market; in return he expected the Federal Power Commission to give him access to Canada at the same time. But the FPC refused, and Symonds is now in no mood to carry out the original agreement until his Canadian market is guaranteed.

"AMERICAN Palestine Trading Corp., a U.S. concern, is planning to spend $5,000,000 drilling for oil on a 500,000-acre lease in Israel. The cost will be divided by U.S. and Israeli investors, and the actual drilling will be done by Oklahoma Senator Robert Kerr's Kerr-McGee Oil Industries Inc. of Oklahoma City.

THE Federal Power Commission, which under the Democrats clamped a 6% ceiling on natural gas companies' earnings, has approved a rate increase giving United Fuel Gas Co. a 6 1/4% return on its investment.

IN any recession, one business sure to boom is roadbuilding, sparked by federal and state aid. As a handy economic anchor to windward, General Motors is buying Cleveland's Euclid Road Machinery Co., one of the biggest U.S. makers of giant earthmovers and other road-building machinery. Price: $18.3 million.

OHIO'S Turnpike Commission, waking up to the fact that trucks will provide two-thirds of its revenue, now plans to spot special parking areas, restaurants and sleeping quarters for truckers along its new 241-mile, $326-million toll highway.

US. Steel, which has made pre-- fabricated wooden houses (Gunnison) since 1944, now hopes to make a big dent in the U.S. housing market with steel models. At a big, new $5,500,000 plant near Harrisburg, Pa., Big Steel will soon turn out 4-ft.-wide steel panels with built-in insulation, and other parts that can be used to assemble complete houses, hospital buildings and schools.

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