Loretta Napoleoni


Loretta Napoleoni is an Italian journalist and political analyst. She reports on the financing of terrorism and connected topics, both finance- and security-related.

Life and career

Loretta was born and raised in Rome, Italy. In the mid 1970s, she became an active feminist and marxist.
She was a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. and a Rotary Scholar at the London School of Economics. She has a M.Phil. in Terrorism Studies from the University of East London, and a Master's in International Relations from SAIS.
In the early 1980s she worked at the National Bank of Hungary on the convertibility of the Hungarian forint that became the blueprint for the convertibility of the ruble a decade later.

Personal life

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

Appointments

She is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundación Ideas para el Progreso, the think tank of Spain's Socialist Party, and she is a partner with Oxfam Italia.

Publications

Napoleoni's writing has appeared in Italian newspapers such as il Caffè, La Repubblica, and Il Fatto Quotidiano. She has worked as a foreign correspondent and columnist for the Spanish newspaper El Pais..
Her best-selling book Terror Incorporated was translated into 12 languages. Her novel Dossier Baghdad is a financial thriller set during the Persian Gulf War. She has also published a nonfiction book about Iraq, Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zarqawi and the New Generation, and several other books, including 2008's Rogue Economics. Rogue Economics, published by Seven Stories Press, was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2008 and a Straight.com Favorite Book of 2008.
The Italian edition of her book Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists Than We Do won the 2010 Book of the Year Prize from the Italian Association for Economics as well as the 2011 Singapore Critics Choice Best Nonfiction on Economics Prize.Maonomics was published in 10 countries and in Italy by RCS MediaGroup.
Napoleoni also writes articles for newspapers and journals including Le Monde, The Guardian, Il Venerdi di Repubblica, l'Espresso, l'Unità, and Wired Italia. In one such article, co-written with Claudia Segre and originally published in L'Osservatore Romano under the title Alternative Credit Mechanisms with a Basic Code of Ethics: From Islamic Proposals and Ideas to the West in Crisis, she recommends that the Vatican consider Sharia-compliant loans, and writes that "in Islamic finance... there is no speculation." Source: ZDFinfo