Luca Ciarrocca

Luca Ciarrocca is an Italian Internet entrepreneur, journalist and author of macroeconomic books. He is the founder of Italia.co, an independent website that covers economy and geopolitics.^[1] In 1999 he launched the financial information website Wall Street Italia, which he directed for 15 years, until he sold it in 2014. Two of his books are considered radically critical of the banking and financial system. The focus is: the intervention of central banks in economies actually enhances the huge inequalities that benefit the ultra-rich. In September 2015 he published "Rimetti a noi i nostri debiti" (Guerini)^[2] (Forgive Us Our Debt) an essay on public debt which proposes a "QE For The People" and a Giubilee for the debt. In November 2013 "I padroni del mondo" ^[3] (Chiarelettere) “(Masters of The World – How the Global Finance Elite Decides the Fate of Governments and Populations) which became a best seller with 5 printings.

Biography

Luca Ciarrocca was born in Rome. His paternal family comes from Santo Stefano di Sessanio, in the province of L'Aquila, Abruzzi. He completed his professional education with a degree in Law at Università La Sapienza, Rome, followed by a Master in Business Administration, with specialty in Finance, from the SAA (Scuola di Amministrazione Aziendale) in Turin.

Career

Luca Ciarrocca chose financial journalism as his career path and landed a post-MBA internship at Mondo Economico, the weekly magazine of Il Sole 24 Ore, his first full-time job. He became a licensed journalist and was nominated senior editor of Il Mondo, a weekly business and political magazine within the RCS-Corriere della Sera Group. Later he was selected to become correspondent in New York and moved to the US. In New York over the course of many years, he worked for several major Italian media outlets, including Il Giornale, ANSA, L'Espresso. He has also written for La Repubblica, Milano Finanza and The Street.^[4][5] He regularly appears as a financial, economic and political pundit on Italian television and radio programs, like RAI, Mediaset, SkyNews, La7 and other media.

Online Financial News

Ciarrocca came up with the idea for Wall Street Italia in New York during the summer of 1999 and the website was launched on October 11, during the golden season of the "new economy". The offices were on the 73rd floor of the Empire State Building in Manhattan. For a few years about 30% of Wall Street Italia shares were owned by HdpNet, the Internet holding company that belonged to the leading Italian publishing group RCS-Corriere della Sera. Following the withdrawal of Corriere della Sera from the business, as Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief, Ciarrocca practiced an unbiased and aggressive approach in the world of online business news. Traffic on the website grew during the years 2008-2011, along with financial crisis. Later more space was given to geopolitics and macro economy. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Luca Ciarrocca was the first in the world to give news of the Al Qaeda terrorist attack on the World Trade Center Towers. Ciarrocca sold Wall Street Italia in October 2014 to an Internet media company listed at the Milan Stock Exchange, choosing to remain independent and pursuing a career as macroeconomic author.

Editorial opinion

Luca Ciarrocca has strongly criticized Italy's government policy (Prime Ministers Berlusconi, Monti, Letta and Renzi, the last three not elected by popular vote but nominated with approval of the EU) and the Italian party system; the disfunctionalities of Europe and its currency, the Euro; the recessionary consequences of austerity measures and high taxation applied to cash-strapped countries with huge public debt like Greece, Spain and Italy - causing low economic growth and high unemployment through policies beneficial to other EU countries, especially for Germany; the unfairness and weakness of Brussels' internal mechanisms, such as the ESM (European Stability Mechanism) and the Fiscal Compact with their hidden and unbearable burden for the middle class of Mediterranean countries.

Awards

In 1997 he was awarded the "Premiolino" prize, the oldest and one of the most respected Italian journalistic awards, nominated by ANSA for "having beaten the powerful American news agencies on their own turf".^[6]

Published work

In September 2015 Ciarrocca published "Rimetti a noi i nostri debiti" (Guerini)^[7] (Forgive Us Our Debt) an essay on public debt which proposes a "QE For The People" (a new form of Quantitative Easing: central banks should give 'helicopter money' directly to taxpayers, not to commercial banks who are responsible in the first place for the economic and financial crisis) and a Giubilee for debt. In November 2013 he published "I padroni del mondo"^[8] (Chiarelettere) “(Masters of the World – How the Global Finance Elite Decides the Fate of Governments and Populations). A best seller with 5 printings, this essay is radically critical of central banks. It covers the financial crisis and monetary reforms, in particular the proposal by the organization Positive Money ^[9] for fixing the dysfunctional global banking system. His first book was in 2001 "Investire in tempo di guerra" (Investing in Times of War), Edizioni Nutrimenti.^[10]

References

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