Rogue Economics [Hardcover]

Loretta Napoleoni (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 18, 2008

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? With the precision of an economist and the narrative deftness of a storyteller, syndicated journalist Loretta Napoleoni examines how the world is being reshaped by dark economic forces, creating victims out of millions of ordinary people whose lives have become trapped inside a fantasy world of consumerism. Napoleoni reveals the architecture of our world, and in doing so provides fresh insight into many of the most insoluble problems of our era.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. After looking into how terrorism gets paid for (Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism), Napoleoni tackles the whole of capitalism's dark side: the economics of illegal, criminal and terrorist activities worldwide. There's no shortage of material, including the sex trade of Eastern Europe, internet fraud, piracy (both nautical and intellectual), human slavery, drugs and even the subprime mortgage lending scandal. Unsettling, eye-opening statistics abound-one third of all fish eaten in the UK is illegally poached; today, 27 million slaves worldwide generate annual profits of $31 billion; up until 9/11, 80 percent of the $1.5 trillion underworld economy was laundered through the US (the Patriot Act moved much of this business to Europe)-and Napoleoni's bold analysis begs controversy. From page one, she ties the illegal business boom directly to the spread of democracy, pointing to the fall of the Berlin Wall as the moment when "rogue economics" were unleashed in their current, globe-enveloping iteration. 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. Like those, this volume doesn't provide many answers, but the questions it raises are profound.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

LORETTA NAPOLEONI is the author of the bestselling book Rogue Economics: Capitalism's New Reality, which has been translated into fourteen languages, Terrorism and the Economy, and 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 La Stampa, Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, El País, and Le Monde. A former Fulbright scholar, she holds 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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press (March 18, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1583228241
• ISBN-13: 978-1583228241
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #992,646 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Loretta Napoleoni's first book, the bestselling Terror Inc: Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism, has been translated into twelve languages; her second, Insurgent Iraq was an early look at the growing insurgency led by al-Zarqawi (and came out just as American media and government were recognizing his power). Napoleoni holds an MA in international relations and economics from Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD in terrorism from the London School of Economics. For her work as a consultant for the commodities markets, she met often with officials of many Middle Eastern nations. Her latest book is Rogue Economics: Capitalism's New Reality (Seven Stories Press).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Eye-opening, February 22, 2009

By 

Mark K. Jensen (Tacoma, WA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rogue Economics (Hardcover)

An interesting, eye-opening, provocative book; very outside-the-box. But also a very self-indulgent one. Conceptually, its oddest feature is the lack of any discussion of the corporation as a socioeconomic institution, with no sustained discussion of the most important political institution, the state. Napoleoni is perhaps typical of certain lightweight Italian intellectuals inclined to portentousness (e.g. Julien Benda, Nicola Chiaromonte). Napoleoni does not use terms precisely and does not define terms, including "rogue economics" (in her Mar, 31, 2008, interview on Democracy Now! she asserted that "all Western economies are rogue economies," but she does not use the term "rogue economy" in this book); "GDP" is used for for annual growth in GDP (45); she misspells Philip Bobbitt as "Philip Bobbit" (79, 295) but also gets it right once (162); a key reference to Hannah Arendt refers only to an anthology in Italian, not the original (275n.23). Her rambling discursive style may be due to her desire to incorporate topics to which she has devoted journalistic work. Napoleoni also writes in a journalistic style, using short, simplistic, punchy sentences. She tends to toss out statistics, then move on. There is a regrettable tendency to hyperbole in her writing: "American middle-class families cannot plan holidays, birthday parties, even a future for their children, because they do not know if tomorrow they will still have a home" (43). "China's overwhelming and unchallenged absolute advantage revolves around an endless supply of cheap labor, a resource so powerful that it has stripped industrialized economies of their comparative advantage" (35). "It is in the domain of chaos, therefore, that Western thinking fails" (82; actually, Western thinking has been extremely fruitful in the domain of chaos: cf. Henri Poincaré, Jacques Hadamard, G.D. Birkhoff, M.L. Cartwright and J.E. Littlewood, Stephen Smale, Edward Lorenz, Benoît Mandelbrot, James Yorke, Robert Shaw, Albert J. Bichaber, Mitchell Feigenbaum, etc.; see James Gleick, Chaos: Making of a New Science (1987)); "foreign aid is the true cause of the malaise of Africa" (196); Islamic finance is "growing at the speed of light" (252).

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Definative "Must Read" -, May 8, 2008

By 

J. Marden "RowCom" (Geneva) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rogue Economics (Hardcover)

Brilliantly informative and interesting. Having lived personally through the changes of the world since the collapse of the WALL initially as a Soviet Analyst based in Geneva Switzerland, and through the downsizing and offshoring of the Multinational world as a manufacturing exec, it is the closest approach to my own observations of the changes in the world. Growing hidden & open forms of slavery emerging across the world. The undermining or destruction of the market supervision capabilities of National Governments and inefectiveness of the International Organizations in the face of the mushrooming grey offshore universes of the Internet and extra-National (or offshore) financial markets.

WOW - private sector currencies developing on the net.
- Muslim Banking pushing for a return of their ancient Gold
Standard currency.

My own obserbvations re the collapse of the USSR and the parallels today in the erroading public faith in our own system frighten me, and this well written and catching book is both fair and non-alarmist, but provides insite into major frightening trends that are shaping the new order.

BRAVO Loretta Napoleoni

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Investigative Writing/Analysis At Its Superlative Best !!!!!, August 14, 2009

By 

R. A. Barricklow "Scaramouche" (Las Vegas NV USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rogue Economics (Hardcover)

It would take an independent publishing house like A Seven Stories Press plus a striking Italian intrepid investigative writer to cast a light upon the coming darkness: Rogue Economics. It is a recurrent phenomenom in history caused by a sudden unexpected great transformation; unfortunately, in this eternal battle between politics and economics, globalized politics has been SLAMMED to the economic mat in a stranglehold of slave labor, piracy of the internet & seas, of fraud & fakes, of theft & money laundering, pornography & prostitution, usury & sweat shops, Fascism with Capital, Communism with Capital, & capitalism without capital!
In this global economy of today it is increasingly difficult for politics to regulate the market. In 50 years, less than a lifetime, the American dream has turned into an American nightmare where globalization has laid the groundwork for the socioeconomic decline of Middle-Class America, the backbone of the victorious U.S./ Corporations outsourced jobs and relocated production abroad. Dismantling of communism can be compared to the melting of the North Pole's ice cap: cheap labor flooded the market redesigning the economies of entire markets.
Global capitalism, driven by speculation & finance is robbing the middle class of its share of the productivity & new wealth. Aggressive and unethical groups of hedge funds are today among the most powerful of globaliization's outlaws. They are the bullies of finance, using the size of their portfolios to crush industry and circumvent legislation, because they are unregulated they elude national monetary & financial controls.
The author gives specifics in many areas of the "outlaw economy". For instance, in the telling of how the n'drangheta has gone beyond crime by cornering the global market in the supply of illegimate infrastructure. She goes into detail of how the new model of globalized organized crime revolves around business ventures between foreign and local crime.
Again and again she gets back to the point: Politics, as freedom of choice, remains the sole force to prevent economic & social injustice!
Globalized politics goes well beyond nations' high ideals to the extent that it can become a vicious, highly unpredictable battle for economic power. Economics has gone global and has broken away from the restraints of domestic politics!
Power is achieved and maintained only through violence & force.
In 1992 the World Bank admitted that consumers were the greatest losers in privatization! Counterfeit erection pills net more money than heroine. These and many, many other facts abound to lighten up the heavy duty subject matter. Also the author's observations are not only astute, sometimes they are astondingly intuitive. In her informative & detailed discussion of the market-sate in China she observes that this "real market-state" is moving toward the "virtual market state"/she describes this virtual world breathtakingly well in her chapter entitled, "High Tech: A Mixed Blessing?"
Also of significance to those looking to the New World Order(FAT CHANCE!) is her chapter on its pending nemesis: Islamic Finance - the fastest-growing, most dyanamic sector of the global economy!
I could go on & on & on/ like the enegizer bunny about this coming paradigm shift of reality, but sufice to say. when you turn the last page you'll be looking for her next book. She is ahead of the power curve. Cutting edge. But most importantly she speaks and writes truth to the powers to be.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED !!!!!