Foreign (International) Loans, the granting and use of monetary resources lent on specified conditions to satisfy the needs of the borrowers. Under pre-monopoly capitalism, loans were usually granted by individual foreign banks or capitalists. Under imperialism, particularly at the stage of state-monopoly capitalism, this function is primarily fulfilled by the bourgeois countries, in particular the USA, and also by Britain, France, the FRG, Japan and several international organisations, the largest among them being the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Foreign loans are used by monopolies to capture markets and sources of raw materials belonging to the borrower countries, to plunder and enslave them, and to invest their own capital on profitable terms. After World War II, some changes occurred in the export of capital, foreign loans being one of its forms. An international situation had evolved which made the monopoly export of capital far more complicated, largely due to the emergence of the world socialist system. The export of capital became still more uneven, and the struggle waged by the imperialist powers for spheres of capital investment grew more acute. Statemonopoly trends in the export of capital became increasingly pronounced. During the 1970s, the amount of foreign government loans and subsidies increased twice as rapidly as that of the export of private capital. The export of capital has become more closely involved with militarist interests. Monopolies willingly provide big loans to the governments of their own countries, thus obtaining guaranteed incomes in the form of interest. The export of capital has become the principal economic mainstay of neo-colonialism, and a means of supporting anti-democratic, reactionary regimes. Foreign loans granted by the USSR and the other socialist countries are of an entirely different nature. The socialist countries, guided by the principles of proletarian internationalism, assist the developing countries in implementing their plans of industrialisation (see Industrialisation in the Developing Countries), and in building their economies without any military or political strings attached to the loans or subsidies. The USSR and the other socialist countries accept national currencies or these countries’ traditional trade items as payments for the loans and as the interest on them. Economic relations between the socialist and the capitalist countries involved in granting loans are founded on the principle of mutual benefit.