This article asks whether the process of financial globalization and its recent crisis can be explained by Karl Polanyi's notion of the double movement and argues, in tune with this notion, that capitalist market relations depend on certain institutional arrangements and yet the development of the market forces deteriorates these institutions' arrangements to such extent that even the “capitalist business itself had to be sheltered from the unrestricted working of the market mechanism” (Polanyi 1944: 193).