Loretta Napoleoni

Loretta Napoleoni
Economist, author, journalist and political analyst.
Website
http://lorettanapoleoni.net

Loretta Napoleoni (born 1955) is an Italian economist, author, journalist and political analyst. She is an expert on the financing of terrorism and is well known internationally for having calculated the size of the terror economy.

Life and career

Napoleoni was born and raised in Rome, Italy. An active member of the feminist movement in the mid 1970s, she was a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., and a Rotary Scholar at the London School of Economics (LSE). She has a M.Phil. in Terrorism from LSE, a Master's in International Relations from SAIS, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Rome.

As an economist Napoleoni has worked for several banks and international organizations in Europe and the United States. In the early 1980s she worked at the National Bank of Hungary on the convertibility of the Hungarian forint that became the blue print for the convertibility of the ruble a decade later.

As well as lecturing regularly on the financing of terrorism, Napoleoni advises several governments on counter-terrorism. As chairman of the counter terrorism financing group for the Club de Madrid, she brought heads of state from around the world together to create a new strategy for combating the financing of terror networks.

Napoleoni lives in London, England, and Whitefish, Montana, with her husband and children.

Appointments

She is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spain's Socialist Party's think tank. Since 2007 she has been Director of the first Italian investigative journalism course., and lectured at Cambridge University's Judge Business School

Publications

Napoleoni's writing appears regularly in many journals and publications, including several European newspapers. She has worked as a foreign correspondent and columnist for several Italian financial papers. She was among the few people to interview the Red Brigades in Italy after three decades of silence.

Napoleoni has written novels, guide books in Italian and translated and edited books on terrorism. Her best-selling book Terror Incorporated was translated into 12 languages, Dossier Baghdad is a financial thriller set during the Persian Gulf War, and she has also published a nonfiction book about Iraq: Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zarqawi and the New Generation. Rogue Economics, was published in 2008 by Seven Stories Press in the US, and by Turnaround in the UK. Her most recent book in English 10 Years That Shook The World: A Timeline of Events from 2001 was published as an e-book by Seven Stories Press on 6 September 2011 to mark the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It covers issues as diverse as financial policy, advances in science and technology, new economic policies, propaganda, environmental issues and the revolutionary powers of social media.

Her forthcoming book is called Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists Than We Do. The Italian edition of Maonomics won the 2010 Premio dell'Associazione per il Progresso Economico award

Loretta also writes articles for newspapers and journals including El Pais, Le Monde, The Guardian, Il Venerdi di Repubblica, l'Espresso, l'Unità, Il Caffè and Wired Italia.

Quotations

“	Politicians are the great illusionists ... The reason why they are illusionists is because politics has lost control of the economy. Politics should be a battle of ideas, it is not any more a battle of ideas. There is no left, there is no right. Politicians, what they do is, they create a basic economic condition for the individual and a corporation in order to grow economically, to become rich. But to hide this kind of transformation to hide the true nature of the state which has now become a market-state -- they project illusions. This is the key problem, that we, the people, are on the receiving-end of these illusions and often we don't know what is real and what is not.	”
	— Loretta Napoleoni, Radio New Zealand interview

Bibliography

• Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks (2005) [1]
• Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zarqawi and the New Generation (2005) [2]
• Rogue Economics: Capitalism's New Reality (2008, 2nd ed. 2009) [3]
• Terrorism and the Economy: How the War on Terror is Bankrupting the World (2010) [4]
• 10 Years That Shook The World: A Timeline of Events from 2001 (2011) [5]
• Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists Than We Do (October 2011) [6]

References

1. Penguin Books Author Search Results [7]. Retrieved on 2007-11-12
2. Goodman, Amy Italian Writer Loretta Napoleoni on the Amman Triple Bombing, How the U.S. Helped Create Zarqawi and the Terror Financing Network - Interview [8] DemocracyNow!.org. Retrieved on 2007-11-12
3. The Senlis Council The Third International Symposium on Global Drug Policy: Paris 2004 - Guest Speaker [9] SenlisCouncil.net. Retrieved on 2007=11=12
4. Forum Barcelona 2004 - Universal Forum of Cultures Speaker Search - Guest Speaker [10] . Retrieved on 2007-11-12
5. Buchanan, Michael London bombs cost just hundredsBBC online news article - Interview [11] BBC.co.uk. Retrieved 2007-11-12
6. Cowell, Alan OFF THE SHELF; Terrorism's Cost in a Global Economy - Review [12] NewYorkTimes.com. Retrieved on 2007-11-12
7. The Guardian, Special Report Security and Terrorism Rapid rise of the economy of terror- Article [13] Guardian.co.uk. Retrieved on 2007-11-12
8. Dateline, Loretta Napoleoni Interview[14] SBS.com.au. Retrieved on 2007-11-15
9. Four Corners, Loretta Napoleoni Interview[15] ABC.net.au. Retrieved on 2007-11-15

External links

• Loretta Napoleoni website
• The Value of Human Rights,Constitutional Rights,and of the Rule of Law
• Democracy Now! Loretta Napoleoni interview (03/2008)
• Democracy Now! Loretta Napoleoni interview (11/2005)
• Audio: Loretta Napoleoni in conversation on the BBC World Service discussion show The Forum
• The intricate economics of terrorism TED (conference)