A Moloch demanding the whole world as a sacrifice

Financialization has substantially transformed accumulation dynamics in advanced capitalist economies and societies. The paper proposes a sociological model of financial circulation that maps the basic institutional structures of financial accumulation in advanced capitalism. This begins by a distinction between industrial and financial circulation. The former brings together wage earners, capitalist corporations and banks around relations of investment, production and consumption. The latter emerges through the interactions between a different set of capitalists: funds, financial exchanges and investment banks. It then examines financialization as a process of mediation of industrial circulation by financial circulation through specific flows of financial capital. The article concludes by assessing the contradictions that arise from financialized accumulation dynamics in growth dependent capitalist societies.