# Some readers may be familiar with microfinancing which was pioneered by Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts to help rural Bangladeshi women by empowering them with small loans. In the early phases, the Grameen Bank was nonprofit and underwritten by Muhammad Yunus. Even before the bank went commercial, his success in aiding the poor may have been overstated.
# To western observers, it seemed like a golden opportunity to earn profits from the rural poor who had previously been dismissed as too illiterate to bother with. Investment bankers pointed out that 100 loans of $100 would earn the same return as a $10,000 loan to one corporate client.
# SPOILER ALERT: skip the rest of this review if you like being mystified.
# Bob, one of the main characters, is a high-profile reporter for the New York Post. He's intrigued by Prasad Kamineni who has brought Wall Street investors onboard to expand his microfinancing of India's rural poor. Bob has his doubts, since the bubble has just burst on mortgage-backed securities, and bankers have grown risk shy. Meanwhile a number of rural India women are committing suicide. Bob decides to research the microfinancing phenomena and Prasad Kamineni in particular.
# Chandresh Rajan is Bob's local contact in India. Chandresh has contacts on all sides of issue, even among the Maoist anarchists. He uncovers a chain of parasites from loan collectors, to crime bosses and crooked politicians. Meanwhile, Bob tracks down the money trail through holding companies in several countries and eventually back to Wall Street. In short, microfinancing becomes revealed as a heartless exploitation of rural women that it's supposed to help. The evidence is plain as day, but government higher-ups kill the investigation before it implicates the ruling party.
# Prasad Kamineni bows out and disappears for a few years. Then he's back in business, working the same scam for a microfinancing bank with a different name. Bob wins a prestigious award for investigative journalism. Chandresh Rajan knows the real culprits have gotten off Scott-free.
# Some readers may think this scam can only happen in a 3rd-world country where the marks are country bumpkins. Think again. The global financial sector is as crooked as a three-dollar bill. The mortgage-backed fiasco was a tad more sophisticated than duping illiterate housewives in rural India, but it was just as exploitive. And the real culprits got off Scott-free. Sad but true.