Costas Lapavitsas

Independent activity Western Marxism 1961.1.20.–

Greek Marxist economist of "financialised capitalism" and "financial expropriation"

Lapavitsas took a master's degree at the London School of Economics in 1982 and a PhD at Birkbeck College in 1986, and has taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, since 1999, as professor since 2008. In 2007 he founded Research on Money and Finance (RMF), an international network of political economists. In Profiting Without Producing (2013) and other works he theorised "financial expropriation", in which banks profit from lending to households, and "financialised capitalism". During the Greek debt crisis he argued for leaving the euro, was elected to the Hellenic Parliament for Syriza in January 2015 and moved to Popular Unity in August 2015.