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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.

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.

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. During an interview on Italian radio show "La Trasmissione di Morelli" with Dario Morelli, Loretta Napoleoni said: "I wrote my first novel in 1968 when I was 16. It was about the Prague spring, but it was never published: anyone has read it, anyone will never read it". 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. Her most recent book written in English, Rogue Economics, was published in 2008 by Seven Stories Press in the US, and by Turnaround in the UK.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.

Since 2007 she has been Director of the first Italian investigative journalism course.

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

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Loretta Napoleoni", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0