ABSTRACT
The financing of these operations caused huge quantities of dollars to flood onto international currency markets and substantial amounts of these funds became the basis of the secondary banking and credit system known as the Euro-dollar market. More than anything, these conditions resulted from the fact that the Bretton Woods settlement had not been an international agreement constructed on the basis of clearly thought out principles and freely negotiated arrangements. A variant of this system was adopted in early 1972 by the members of the European Economic Community and known as the SNAKE. International economic development in the 1970s and 1980s was increasingly subject to the somewhat conflicting forces of neo-mercantilism and economic globalization. Estimates of the future flow of production varied but the crucial point was that the contribution of oil revenues to the balance of payments was directly dependent on price fixing by a cartel, The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
