Haig Urges Firm Summit Effort to Stabilize Dollar

Republican presidential contender Alexander M. Haig Jr. warned Monday that if President Reagan and other Western leaders allow themselves to be distracted from economic issues at their summit meeting next week, they may add “another chapter to the chronicle of lost opportunities.”

Haig told a meeting of the American Bankers Assn. that “we cannot be satisfied with a summit that solemnly proclaims that the dollar will be stabilized when we know that in the absence of other actions it will not stabilized.”

Haig, who participated in two such meetings as Reagan’s first secretary of state, spoke a week before Reagan and the leaders of Western economic powers and Japan meet in Venice, Italy, for an economic summit.

In a speech billed as a major economic address, Haig urged the summit participants to instruct their experts to prepare a timetable to eliminate agricultural subsidies and to commission a fresh plan for dealing with the Third World debt crisis. He also argued for examining U.S. antitrust laws, regulations and tax codes for ways to help U.S. manufacturers, and enactment of a presidential line item veto to battle the budget deficit.