Abstract
It has become common to listen to arguments that great transformations of the economic-institutional system will happen, that it will be similar to what happened after the Great Depression of 1929 and the crisis of 1974–1975. There are essentially two reasons for such perception: the depth of the present international economic crisis and the impossibility of sustaining an accumulation model which, as is said, has been supported by the financial sector and its profit. This paper compares, in addition to the crises, the accumulation models in which the three previous crises exploded. Attention is paid not only to the global character of the present crisis, but also to the meaning of the present crisis within the context of globalization.