MONEY TREE (44 page)

Stan had already fixed him up with an agent who was in the final throes of a publishers’ auction.
The book wasn’t finished yet but Spielberg had already taken an option on the film rights. The trade was referring to it as the antidote to The Wolf of Wall Street.

All he needed was a
snappy title; something better than his working label of
Cowboys and Indians
. But he’d learned not to get stalled on stuff that didn’t matter. 

As he settled his
fingers on the keys, a glowing email prompt caught his eye. Erin sometimes emailed him. And Anila too. She loved practising her English by dropping him news of village life. He recalled with a smile her first, stuttering text, full of thanks and relief that Meera had bought off Anila’s foul husband and mother-in-law. She had a new life.

He’d even heard from Veronica Yeardon. Once pal Joey learned about his boss’s swallo
w dive, he’d been quick to plea-bargain for his own neck. Veronica’s emails were very persistent about having him visit her in the Spring; check out the cherry blossom. The only one he hadn’t heard from was Oscar. And he wondered how he’d deal with that in the book. He’d just have to make up an ending. Hero or villain?

He recalled a conversation with
Erin as they flew down to Bhopal after a week of silence from Oscar and his gang:

‘It was like putting a bunch of safe crackers inside a bank vault, with the keys,’ she was saying.

‘I don
’t believe it. Won’t believe it,’ he said.

Erin
raised her eyebrows. Ted continued.

‘
They’d be found out. Wouldn’t they? I mean when they get the bank up and running again?’

Erin
mused. ‘Depends how closely they can reconcile the positions before and after. It’s almost impossible to do an audit trail if you don’t have records for a huge chunk of time. The market moves, deposits come and go, deals are half way through being struck, interbank transfers are interrupted. If I were the regulators and auditors I’d be happy to get within – let’s think – 1%? - of the last known position. And let’s say the bank had minimum $100 Billion in free money swilling about. That would be $1billion to play with - so to speak.’

Ted
stared at her. ‘Mother of God…’

He clicked on the screen prompt, and retrieved the message. He felt a familiar pang. It hurled him back five eventful months. This time he didn’t hesitate to open and read it.

I’ve just heard from Oscar!!! Take a look at the attached and tell me what I should do!

-
Diogenes -

Dearest Erin – how are my goldfish? I bet you’ve been wondering when this old carcass of mine would wash up and in how many pieces? Well at least I hope you’ve missed me! And how is that reprobate Ted? I don’t see his words of wisdom in the Trib these days. Not that we get the papers much, where we are (wink, wink). Anyway darling, remember that favor you promised me? I want to call it in. It won’t cost you a thing and in fact you might earn a dollar or two out of it (if you need it?). The thing is, I need some advice. Some investment advice. Why don’t you email me with an address I can send an air ticket to and you could come visit us here, first class of course. It’s lovely at this time of year. The flowers, the water, the boys… such a life.

-
Love Oscar-

Ted threw himself back in his chair and hooted with laughter. He wondered how the North American marketing director of the People’s Bank would square her sense of fiscal duty with her sense of honour. Would she feel obliged to pay her dues to Oscar?

He also recalled her saying
that the Fed and the FBI couldn’t afford to cause another banking crisis by suggesting the markets were at serious risk from a bunch of nerdy kids. So maybe she could take a quiet trip to whatever island in the sun Oscar was hiding on. A quick in and out, like a vacation. He leaned forward and typed, his neat fingernails clicking quickly across the keys:

Diogenes
. I think we need to talk about this one. Face to face. It’s too risky on email. Can we meet? - Ted-

The screen went quiet. There was a knock on his door, the one that led to the dining room that doubled as a second study. The door opened.
A mop of red curls jutted into the room.

‘Before or after skiing?’

In the doorway Erin Wishart stood grinning from freckled ear to ear.

I owe a very big vote of thanks to a small army of people over the many years of gestation of this book:

First and foremost, my agent Tina Betts who saw enough in an early version of The Money Tree to sign me up and stick with me through the long, lean years. Richenda Todd, the professional editor of my
Douglas Brodie
Glasgow Quartet and the strategic editor of Money Tree.

Most of all, I want to thank my many gifted amateur editors and supporters: Robert
Cardinaux, Candace Imison, Helen Ferris, David Henderson, James Hanley, Nilima Patwardhan, Kathryn Ferris, Hazel Rice, Tricia Sharpe, Ray Barker and Alan Johnson.

But
above all, my wife Sarah, who’s reviewed and commented upon more versions of Money Tree than Doctor Who’s had reincarnations.

There is a real People’s Bank and there is a real-life hero. This book is dedicated to
Muhammad Yunus,
founder of the
Grameen Bank
in Bangladesh. In 2006
the Norwegian Nobel Committee
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, divided into two equal parts, to
Muhammad Yunus
and
Grameen Bank
for their efforts to create economic and social development from below. The Committee stated that:

“Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Micro-credit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights.”

In 1983, Professor Muhammad Yunus threw away his economic text books and established the Grameen (or village) Bank to lend tiny amounts of money to the poorest of the poor in his native country of Bangladesh. The personal and compelling story of his conversion and long struggle against convention, mistrust and self-serving interest groups is set out in his 1998 autobiography.

Professor Yunus was educated in Bangladesh and the US and thus has an unusual understanding of the economic systems of East and West. Appointed head of Economics at Chittagong University in 1972, he found himself two years later preaching doctrines that had no relevance to the world outside his classroom. It was a year of famine. Each day on his way to and from work, he was faced with the mortal truth that wealth does not trickle down. Loans to governments, and their consequent centrally planned programmes only benefit the people who manage the loans and implement the programmes. The poor stay poor. And starvation comes to them first.

His answer was to start at the lowest level of society and give tiny loans to the last people on earth on any sensible banker’s customer list: the utterly destitute; the ones without even rice in their bellies, far less a glowing credit history. The professor’s view is,  “Our clients do not have to show how large their savings are and how much wealth they have, they need to prove how poor they are…”

Against all logic, he demonstrated that the very poor are the ideal borrowers. Their desperation to get out of the pit and stay out of it, means they will do anything to repay the debt and inch their way to self-sufficiency thro
ugh a series of low-cost loans.

But surely this idea of micro-credit is only applicable in the developing world, where $25 can turn round the lives of 40 people? Doubters in the developed world claim that their economic context is far too sophisticated for the destitute to flourish as entrepreneurs. The poor are feckless. They’d need expensive training, they’d squander the money on drink or drugs; they’d never pay it back. The arguments Muhammad Yunus heard in Bangladesh are the same ones espoused about the council house tenants of Glasgow’s wastelands, or the welfare recipients of Arkansas. And they are just as hollow.

Throughout the developed world a number of groups promoting Grameen’s ideals are active. A particularly energetic organisation is RESULTS, a grass roots lobbyist with sister groups in the UK, Canada, Germany, Australia and Japan. In the UK the most striking example is the Prince’s Trust. Since its inception in 1983 by the Prince of Wales, over 80,000 disadvantaged young people have been helped to set up in business. Over 60% of these tiny businesses are still trading after 3 years, a track record that the typical bank could only dream of.

The proof is in the statistics: as at 2008 the Grameen Bank was achieving an unheard of loan recovery rate of 98%, more than any other bank in the world. Of perhaps greater significance is that 97% of the 8.5 million borrowers [as at 2011] are women
.
Male traditionalist in this Muslim country are enraged at this emancipation of their women-folk. This may have been a contributory factor in the Bangladeshi Government’s determination to oust Muhammad Yunus from the Grameen Bank.

Bangladesh has a long history of banks and cooperatives  being used as political instruments. State owned banks have regularly extended loans to elite borrowers who default at high rates as a form of patronage. The governing
Awami League were determined to gain control of this upstart bank despite Grameen’s extraordinary achievements. There may even have been straightforward jealousy on the part of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina at Yunus’s renown and world wide regard. Hasina made it clear that she thought the Nobel Prize should have gone to her for signing a modest peace treaty in 1997.

At any rate in 2010 the Bangladeshi Supreme Court launched an action against Muhammad Yunus claiming misuse of funds. This was disproved, but in 2011 the Government fired Professor Yunus on the spurious grounds of his violating the country’s retirement laws by staying on past 60.

This has not ended Sheik Hasina’s vendetta against Muhammed Yunus; in 2013 she put him on trial again, this time claiming he had received his earnings including the Nobel Prize award, without obtaining permission from her government.

In a final act of spleen, the government has effectively nationalised the Grameen Bank and it is likely to go the same criminal way of all other banks in that corruption-ridden country.

But losing his job as head of Grameen has not silenced Muhammad Yunus. His goal is quit
e simply the eradication of world poverty.

“
Our [Grameen Bank] success is measured not by bad debt figures or repayment rates… but by whether the miserable and difficult lives of our borrowers have become less miserable, less difficult.
”

To that end, Muhammad Yunus has become one of the founding members of the Global Elders, serves on the board of the UN Foundation and is a Counsellor at One Young World summits since the inaugural meeting in London in 2010.

The final words are his:

“Grameen is a message of hope, a programme for putting homelessness and destitution in a museum so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long.”

The title of this book has both an allegorical and a botanical reference. The image of a spreading tree, with deep roots, bearing fruit and providing shade is a fine symbol for a ‘People’s Bank’. But it also describes and draws on the reality of the Neem tree.

To a villager in a country where summer temperatures frequently rise above 40 degrees, where shade is at a premium and where the nearest pharmacy is several hundred miles and a financial mountain away, the Neem tree is a god-send. The word Neem in Hindi means ‘blessing’.

The Neem looks a bit like an oak, grows to 50 foot, lives for two centuries, and can survive happily on 18 inches of rain water per year. It is a botanical cousin of mahogany and bears masses of honey-scented white flowers followed by olive-like fruit. The leaves, bark and sap from the 20 million trees across India provide a ready range and supply of medicaments in daily use across the sub continent. The Neem has also been successfully planted in Burma, Central America, the Middle East and Africa. Near Mecca, for example, a Saudi philanthropist planted a forest of 50,000 Neems to shade and comfort the two million pilgrims who camp each year on the Plains of Arafat.  In short, the Neem is an ideal tree for anywhere hot.

Shade against the equatorial sun is one blessing. But the
Neem’s greatest gift is medicinal. It has a hallowed place in Indian Ayurvedic medicine for its extraordinary range of  properties. Neem compounds have been found in the 4500 year old ruins of the great Harappa civilization in North Western India. Scientists are still grappling with understanding and proving its many applications, but villagers and farmers have no doubt about its daily use as :