A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF 2008

STRAIGHT.COM FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2008

“Timely and fascinating, Napoleoni’s top-notch reporting, in which her attention turns from Viagra to blood diamonds to the banana price wars in a few pages, works in the vein of Freakonomics, and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, but much grimmer.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“Loretta Napoleoni’s devilishly enjoyable journey into the money veins of the new global order—from sex slavery to fad-diet slavery...is truly incredibly original.”—GREG PALAST, AUTHOR OF THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY

“Rogue Economics offers a fascinating view of how terribly wrong things have gone.” —JOHN PERKINS, AUTHOR OF CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN

What do Eastern Europe’s booming sex trade, America’s subprime mortgage lending scandal, China’s fake goods industry, and celebrity philanthropy in Africa have in common? With biopirates trolling the blood industry, fish-farming bandits ravaging the high seas, pornography developing virtually in Second Life, and games like World of Warcraft spawning online sweatshops, how are rogue industries transmuting into global empires? And will the entire system be transformed by the advent of sharia economics? Economist and best-selling author Loretta Napoleoni examines how dark economic forces are creating victims out of millions of ordinary people whose lives have become trapped inside a world they don’t understand.

Loretta Napoleoni is the author of the best-selling book Terror Inc.: Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism, which has been translated into twelve languages. One of the world’s leading experts on money laundering and terror financing, she has worked as London correspondent and columnist for Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, El Pais, and Le Monde. A former Fulbright scholar, she holds a PhD in economics, an MA in international relations and economics from Johns Hopkins University, and an MPhil in terrorism from the London School of Economics. For her work as a consultant for the commodities markets, she traveled regularly to Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries, where she has met top financial and political leaders. She lives in London.

Economist and syndicated journalist Loretta Napoleoni argues that the world is undergoing rapid and unexpected great transformations fueled by what she calls rogue economics. Eagerly awaited around the world (translation rights have already been sold throughout Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia), Napoleoni’s account is based on top-to-bottom primary-source interviews from banking executives in New York to Russian prostitutes to London morgue workers, and grounded in the author’s personal experience in international finance. From Eastern Europe’s booming sex trade industry to China’s “online sweatshops,” from al-Qaeda’s underwriters to America’s subprime mortgage lending scandal, Rogue Economics exposes the paradoxical economic connections of the new global marketplace.

Loretta Napoleoni is the author of the best-selling book Terror Inc.: Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism, which has been translated into twelve languages. One of the world’s leading experts on money laundering and terror financing, she has worked as London correspondent and columnist for Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, El Pais, and Le Monde. A former Fulbright scholar, she holds a PhD in economics, an MA in international relations and economics from Johns Hopkins University, and an MPhil in terrorism from the London School of Economics. For her work as a consultant for the commodities markets, she traveled regularly to Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries, where she has met top financial and political leaders. She lives in London.

“Napoleoni has accomplished an extraordinary task of research in tracking, finding and graphically describing the financiers and the institutions supporting global terrorism, including al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.”—John K. Cooley, author of Unholy Wars

“A masterpiece . . . This book should be required reading for everyone in the White House, State Department and Pentagon.”—Greg Palast, author of the New York Times bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and The Joker’s Wild: Dubya’s Trick Deck

In Terror Incorporated, Loretta Napoleoni maps out the arteries of an international economic system that feeds armed groups the world over. Chasing terror money, she takes the reader from CIA headquarters to the smuggling routes of the far East, from the back rooms of Wall Street to hawala exchanges in the Middle East.

Napoleoni describes the “New Economy of Terror,” “a fast-growing international economic system with a turnover of about $1.5 trillion [that] is challenging Western hegemony.” It is made up of illegal businesses such as arms and narcotics trading and oil and diamond smuggling, as well as charitable donations and legal profits. Napoleoni reveals the interdependency between economies run by armed groups and Western economies. “As in the Crusades, religion is simply a recruitment tool; the real driving force is economics.”

A pioneering examination of the system and methods by which international terrorism is financed, Terror Incorporated is “penetrating, lucid and essential” (Harry Porter, author of Empire State).

Loretta Napoleoni, a former Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and Rotary scholar at the London School of Economics, is an expert on international terrorism who has worked as an economist and foreign correspondent for Italy’s financial papers. She has translated and edited books on terrorism and was among the few people to interview the Red Brigades in Italy after three decades of silence.