About Us

The financial system has grown into one of the most important powers of everyday life. If it works well, it finances businesses, insures us against risks and helps us build a sustainable future. But when finance is unstable, whole economies crash. If investments only are for profit, they foster fossil fuels and climate change becomes unstoppable. When there is excessive speculation on food, price fluctuations lead to widespread hunger. Apparently we are not yet in agreement on how to make the financial system work.

While most people have an opinion on complex topics such as nuclear power, religion or the weapon industry, financial regulation is regarded to be such a complicated domain that we do not get to talk to regulators and finance professionals face to face.

The Civil Financial Regulation Office (CFRO) was founded to challenge this imbalance in power and knowledge. We are interviewing experts working in all the different institutions that are meant to regulate financial markets and ask them to explain what they do and why. The questions we ask are gathered from the general public through our website and interviews. Step by step we find answers and publish them on our website.

The CFRO is a citizens initiative that started in Greece and is run by researchers from all over Europe. It will collect answers until the 7th of December and protocol everything on this website. CFRO is represented at the 6th Athens Biennale and supported by the German Federal Foreign Office, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the Schöpflin Foundation and the Peng!-collective.

Our Team

Georgios Papadopoulos combines economics and philosophy with artistic research. His work gravitates around money and its socioeconomic functions. Currently Georgios is working on a book for the Routledge International Studies in Money and Banking series, entitled Money after Decentralization. Regarding finance he wonders how banking and finance can encourage sustainable economic development.

Konstantina Liontou studies finance and international relations at Athens University of Economics. In her view, engaging in interesting conversations such as the financial state of the world today can be great fun and terribly intimidating at the same time. One of the questions she would like to get an answer on is why an arbitrary piece of paper that we exchange for basic needs is ruling our lifes.

Maria Georgouli Loupi studied Economic Theory at the Athens University of Economics&Business and enjoys questioning well established beliefs about the economic system and the financial crisis while engaging in real-life Economics. One of the key questions bugging Maria is how economics interact with and influence social institutions.

Flora Zajicek has studied Art History at the University of Edinburgh, focussing inter alia on the link between economics and the art world. She has personal experience with engaging bureaucratic neysayers and gets great enjoyment from challenging them to respond to her as a human and as a consumer at the same time. If only she could get an answer to the questions what it would take to move a community to a skills based economy and reject the currencies we know of now.

Vasilis Andrikopoulos has studied Economics at the University of Athens, being taught by quite a few people who later became Greek minister of finance or having high rankig posititions in the ministry. He now runs a co-op, while still participating in most of Athens’s grassroots political movements and activities concerning urban social life. One of the key question on finance he asks himself is whether, on a global/macro-economic scale, economics or politics come first.

Danai Skentzou studied Economics at the Athens University of Economics and Business. She has always been interested in alternative economic systems and hates that the neoliberal approach is the only branch of economic science recognised and taught by universities. A question that puzzles her a lot is how can people and their real needs take the lead instead of elites and banks?