American Notes WASHINGTON

Back in November, Deputy Treasury Secretary Richard Darman startled the business community with a stinging critique of what he called the U.S. "corpocracy," management that was "bloated, risk-averse, inefficient and unimaginative." After such a harsh assessment of big business, it came as a surprise when Darman, 43, announced last week that he was leaving the Reagan Administration to become a managing director at Shearson Lehman Bros., one of the nation's largest investment-banking firms.

But Darman -- one of Reagan's brightest tacticians and a chief architect of last year's tax-reform plan -- believes he can be a catalyst for productive enterprise in his new career. "Investment banking can be of great social value," he said. "At its best, it can be done on the basis of intellectual capital as well as financial capital."