Since the beginning of the 1980s, Yugoslavia has been so hard hit by economic crisis that the modern inflationary syndrome has overwhelmed both the triumphs and the pitfalls of its political system. The founder and preeminent leader of the country's socialist regime, Josip Broz Tito, died at the age of eighty-six in May, 1980, just as the effects of worldwide recession and the second oil crisis were reaching a climax. After thirty-five years of leadership, Tito left his multiethnic nation of nations with the superb sense of timing for which he was known. He also left 22 million Yugoslavs—including a million unemployed and a million working outside the country—with rapidly mounting debts to the International Monetary Fund and multinational private banks; dramatic shortages of imported fuel and raw materials; a fiscal crisis caused by overexpansion of state budgets on every level; and the tendency among political leaders of the six semiautonomous Yugoslav republics and two “autonomous” regions to compete among themselves for costly and capital-intensive new investment projects.