Several financial indicators display a secular U-shape curve with peaks in 1929 and 2008. To the contrary, the period of ‘financial repression’ inaugurated by the New Deal regulation is marked until 1970 by the absence of banking and currency crises. The main hypothesis of the article is that the 2008 crisis is the consequence of an autonomous process of financial globalization which begins in the 1960s with the expansion of the so-called Eurodollars and goes on over the 1970s with the market of petrodollars. The deregulation increasingly practiced by Western governments since 1973 is an effect rather than a cause of the cross-border flows of capital.