U.S. Interior Secretary Donald Hodel said there was a one in five chance that new drilling in Alaska would find oil. “But if it’s there, there’s a very good chance that it would be a giant field,” Hodel said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “So it is the best geological prospect that they (geologists) have talked to me about since I’ve been involved in this process,” he said. Hodel announced yesterday that he would urge Congress to open up 1.

Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, beleaguered by political turmoil at home, sets out Wednesday on a tough mission to Washington aimed at defusing the most serious U.S.-Japanese trade tension in recent memory. Two rounds of talks between President Reagan and Nakasone, scheduled for Thursday and Friday, come on the heels of the imposition by the United States of punitive tariffs on Japanese goods for the first time since World War Two.

French Finance Minister Edouard Balladur said the Group of Seven major industrial nations, G-7, can achieve stable currency values by adhering to accords reached this year in Paris and Washington. Balladur, asked at a news conference if coordinated market intervention by central banks was sufficient to halt the dollar’s recent slide, said “each country has to fulfill commitments” outlined in the G-7 accords. Earlier this month in Washington, finance ministers of the U.

President Alan Garcia said he sought to deepen Peru’s hard-line foreign debt stance, possibly by limiting repayments to the World Bank. In a televised address tonight, he criticised the World Bank for making Peru make larger debt payments than the amount the bank is willing to make in new loans. “We will deepen our policy on the foreign debt,” he said. Peru has limited foreign debt repayments to 10 pct of export earnings, effectively suspending most remittances due foreign private banks and many governments.

A strike by Japanese dockworkers will continue over the weekend as no breakthrough is in sight, a Japan Harbour Transportation Association spokesman said. The association has not yet agreed on a schedule for preliminary negotiations with the National Council of Harbour Workers Unions, because the council insisted on talks with shippers as well as dock management, he said. The strike, which began on Tuesday, halted container movements to points inside Japan from the ports of Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Kitakyushu, Shimizu, Yokkaichi and Hakata.

The world’s zinc mining and smelting industry will continue to become more concentrated and more integrated in the 1990s, Dr Klaus Goekmann, vice-president of marketing and sales for Cominco Ltd, said. Opening a Metal Bulletin base metals conference here, Goekmann forecast the number of individual businesses in the industry would continue to decline as companies merged or formed conglomerates with increased market shares. At the same time, the conglomerates would become more integrated, handling the entire chain from basic ore production through marketing, he added.

South Korea unveiled a shopping list of 2.6 billion dlrs of U.S. Goods in line with its new policy of seeking to limiting its trade surplus to ease trade friction with Washington. The government said this would help freeze this year’s trade surplus with the United States at the 1986 level. “The surplus, which rose to 7.4 billion dollars last year from 4.3 billion in 1985, was projected to top 10 billion this year but the government has taken steps to constrain it to the seven billion dollar level,” one Trade Ministry official told Reuters.

The Bundesbank intervened in the open market to buy dollars for yen ahead of the Frankfurt fixing, dealers said. They said the Bundesbank bought dollars for around 139.80 yen in small amounts in the half-hour running up to the 1100 GMT fix. The Bundesbank did not intervene when the dollar was fixed in Frankfurt at 1.7969 marks. Earlier the Bank of Japan bought dollars steadily in the Far East, but could not stop heavy selling which pushed the dollar to a post-war low of 139.

Several Japanese buyers have accepted postponement of between 150,000 and 200,000 tonnes of Cuban raw sugar scheduled for delivery in calendar 1987 until next year following a request from Cuba, trade sources said. Cuba had sought delays for some 300,000 tonnes of deliveries, they said. It made a similar request in January when Japanese buyers agreed to postpone some 200,000 tonnes of sugar deliveries for 1987 until 1988. Some buyers rejected the Cuban request because they have already sold the sugar on to refiners, they added.

President Reagan said a further decline in the value of the dollar could be counterproductive. In written answers to questions put by Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper, he noted Treasury Secretary James Baker had said all seven major industrial nations were committed to cooperating in fostering stability of exchange rates. “We all believe a further decline of the dollar could be counterproductive,” Reagan said. Reagan said the best way for the United States to reduce its trade deficit was to export more.