Monday, Sep. 26, 1988

Business Notes MEETINGS

When radical groups started promising to provide "stressful nights" for visiting "bankers and bosses," officials in West Berlin grew uneasy. So as 10,000 moneymen and bureaucrats begin arriving this week for the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, security will be even tighter than it was for President Reagan's visit in June 1987.

An estimated 6,000 city police officers and at least 2,700 more shipped in from West Germany will protect the bankers, who will be shielded also by barbed wire, ID checkpoints and direct phone links with the police. Local protest organizers claim that 40,000 demonstrators, from environmentalists to Communists, will turn out to condemn the bankers' allegedly oppressive policies toward debt-burdened developing countries.