Abstract: This article studies the international capital market in the period 1978-1982. We find that international banking did not lend too much just to Chile, but rather all developing countries received an excess abundance of private loans. This was not the result of recycling petrodollars. The authorities of the lending countries were responsible, who enforced irresponsible regulations against their international banks. The latter were driven by competition to exploit the government guarantee of their deposits by offering excess credit to risky countries under conditions that made it convenient for them to take on too much debt. We concluded that the authorities of those countries must contribute to a resolution of the general problem of foreign debt. However, Chile was more than 70% over-indebted than the other comparable developing countries for internal and external reasons specific to our country.