Over the next five years OPEC's petro powers will drain as much as $570 billion from the world's oil-thirsty economies. Hardest hit will be the less developed countries. With their credit lines stretched to the snapping point, the LDCs may need $70 billion more than international banks are like ly to provide. Result: a potentially smoldering powder keg of political unrest in the Third World.
Delegates to last week's Washington meeting of the International Monetary Fund could find those gloomy predictions in the latest copy of World Financial Markets, the monthly newsletter published by...