Luca Ciarrocca

Luca Ciarrocca is an Italian journalist and author. He is the founder and editor in chief of Wall Street Italia (WSI), an independent website that covers business, economy, news and politics.^[1]

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. In 1987 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. In 1988 he was selected to become correspondent in New York and moved to the US. In New York during many years, worked for several major Italian media outlet, including Il Giornale, ANSA, L'Espresso. He has also written for La Repubblica, Milano Finanza and The Street.^[2][3] He regularly appears as a financial, economic and political pundit on Italian television and radio programs, both RAI, Mediaset, SkyNews and other media.

Wall Street Italia

Ciarrocca came up with the idea for Wall Street Italia (WSI) in New York during the summer of 1999 and the website was launched on October 11, with offices on the 73rd floor of the Empire State Building in Manhattan, during the golden season of the "new economy". For a few years about 30% of the shares of Wall Street Italia were owned by HdpNet, the new internet holding company of RCS Corriere della Sera. Following the withdrawal of Corriere della Sera from the business, in 2007 Ciarrocca handed over the responsibilities of Chief Executive Officer, releasing himself from all managerial responsibilities and going back to full-time reporting as Editor-in-Chief. As traffic grew on WSI during the years 2008-2011, along with the world financial crisis, Ciarrocca later gave more space to politics and to Italian economic policy. Furthermore, Wall Street Italia was first in the world, on the morning of September 11, 2001, to give news of the Al Qaeda terrorist attack on the World Trade Center Towers.

Editorial opinion

Luca Ciarrocca has strongly criticized Italy's government policy (Prime Ministers Berlusconi, Monti and Letta) and the Italian party system, the malfunctions 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; the unfairness and doubts about Brussels internal mechanisms and strategies, such as the ESM (European Stability Mechanism) and the Fiscal Compact.

Awards

In 1997 he was awarded the "Premiolino" prize, the oldest and one of the most respected Italian journalism award, nominated by ANSA for "having beaten the powerful American news agencies on their own turf".^[4]

Published work

In 2001, he published Investire in tempo di guerra (Investing in Times of War), Edizioni Nutrimenti^[5] and in November 2013 "I padroni del mondo"^[6] (Chiarelettere) “(The masters of the world – How the global finance elite decides the fate of governments and populations). A best seller with 3 print in 45 days "I padroni del mondo" is an essay radically critical of central banks in part dedicated to monetary reforms, specifically Positive Money’s proposal^[7] for fixing the dysfunctional global banking system.

References

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