Petrodollars, considerable means obtained by the oil-producing developing countries in connection with the soaring prices of oil and used on the international market as loan capital. As a result of the oil-producing countries’ struggle against British and US oil monopolies, they have managed to increase their profits from oil, intensify their control over oil production and secure a sharp rise in oil prices. The backwardness of the economic and social structure of many of these countries hinders the use of the means obtained from oil sales for the needs of national development. In a number of Arab countries, a significant part of the profit from oil goes to the parasitic feudal upper crust and is invested in banks mainly in the United States and Western Europe. In 1974 and 1975 alone, such investments (excluding government loans to the developing countries and payments to international organisations) made up over 60 billion dollars. Petrodollars have become the most important source of the funds on the West European capital market, facilitating the growth of inflationary tendencies, acting almost exclusively as short-term investments and intensifying the instability of the capitalist countries’ financial system during the monetary crisis. Spontaneous transfers of considerable short-term investment sums from one country to another in order to obtain high interest rates have repeatedly led to a sharp deterioration in the balance of payments of certain West European countries and to the ruin of many, even big, merchant banks. At the same time, petrodollars have become an additional source of financing for the economies of the developed capitalist countries. Further, they are becoming increasingly concentrated in the banks of the oil-producing countries themselves, which have begun to credit industrial, commercial and finance companies in various countries, including the oil-importing ones. Today, the petrodollar market is an arena of competition between the banks of the developed capitalist countries, which initially dictated their conditions for the use of these funds, and those of the oil-producing countries, 271 which are striving to become equal partners in international money and credit relations.