> This is true, but why did it get going in earnest
> in the mid- to late-1970s and not ten or twenty
> years earlier?
My conjecture (if I'm allowed to pin point a somewhat arbitrary beginning in a complex historical process) is that the conditions for this grew out of the imbalances in the U.S. public finances caused by the Vietnam war and the resulting removal by Nixon of the USD/gold legally fixed parity. Bretton-Woods, as lousy as it was, was a form of socialized hedging of forex risk. When exchange rates were allowed to float, the business of private hedging grew rapidly. Large pools of money started to gather in the banks, regular and shadow, flowing through this 24/7 pretty globalized markets. This big money begot ideology, politics, legislation, and hardwired economics. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, banks got recapitalized in the early 1990s, globalization ensued, one thing led to another, etc. etc.