Chapter 5 lays out the institutional grounding for global financial markets and their currency, the USD. This provides an answer to an ongoing puzzle on the origins of the 2008 financial crisis. Scholars of the global banking glut hypothesis recognise that European banks were deeply connected to US finance but do not fully account for why this was the case. By contrast, this chapter demonstrates that, despite their global nature, US and Eurodollars are thoroughly grounded in US financial institutions, which has given US banks an additional competitive edge over other banks. The complex institutional infrastructure made US financial markets exceptionally deep and liquid so that US banks could flexibly fund their practices of liability management (LM) in US money markets and arbitrage between Euro- and USD markets. By contrast, European banks’ money markets were ill-equipped for LM while foreign banks faced heavy restrictions to bank in the US until the 1970s. This posed a key constraint to the international practices of the European banks. In response, German banks expanded their offshore funding practices to access more USDs to be able to compete against US banks.