Credit Blockade

the refusal by individual capitalist states or their international financial organizations to grant credits to an individual nation or group of nations. A credit blockade is one of the most rigid forms of credit discrimination. As a rule, it is related to an economic blockade and is a means of exerting economic and political pressure on a borrower nation by a creditor nation.

A credit blockade was used by the capitalist countries against the Soviet state during the first years of its existence, particularly after the categoric refusal by the Soviet delegation at the Genoa Conference (1922) to assume the debts and obligations of the tsarist government. After World War II, American financial capital and the NATO nations attempted to impose a credit blockade on the socialist nations. One of its manifestations was the refusal of the American-controlled International Bank for Reconstruction and Development to grant credits to Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1947. The credit blockade against the socialist nations was not successful, and credit ties between the socialist and capitalist nations have been expanding, becoming particularly widespread in the late 1960's and early 1970's.