During the 1970s the elites of many Third World countries had borrowed as much as they could to finance development projects. Third World and eastern European debt tripled (to a total of $626 billion) between 1976 and 1982 (Kojm 1984). As alluded to earlier, in 1973 OPEC raised the price of oil from $3.01 to $5.12 a barrel and shortly thereafter increased the price to more than four times the original level. Many non-oil-producing Third World countries were left without sufficient means of paying for oil imports, on which their economies were heavily dependent. These conditions produced a massive shift in the geography of international payments. Oil-producing states accumulated huge surpluses in their balances of payments, while most non-oil-producing countries, especially in the Third World, went into equally serious deficit. These deficits faced by Third World countries were also an opportunity for private financial institutions to step in, especially commercial and investment banks. Led by Citicorp, a U.S. commercial bank based in New York, First World banks first began to lend large amounts of money to the Third World during the late 1960s. The scale of this lending further increased during the mid-1970s when the commercial banks began recycling “petrodollars,” deposited in New York and London banks, as loans to Third World governments. These private institutions were less concerned with the social and political responsibilities attending the loans and were more concerned with the interest earned—on the whole, commercial bank lending was to middle-income industrializing Third World countries, where it was thought that money could be made. The whole process of inflated lending on easy or convoluted terms resulted in even more debt, without much economic growth to service the loans, and in excess, unneeded imports, contributing even further to national deficits. Increasingly, Third World countries accrued new debt merely to repay interest on the old. Then financial institutions in the West suddenly realized that many debtors were not repaying their loans. The major banks panicked and refused to lend more. Third World countries could no longer borrow to cover their balance of payments deficits.