Guilt!
Dei uma pesquisada básica atrás de fatos e não de opiniões. Bem, alguns fatos são intrigantes:
It turns out, however, there's more to Yunus's banking scheme than meets the eye. Grameen is not a bank at all. Deposits from individuals and firms account for a mere 3% of its assets. The bank actually functions as a conduit for huge grants from governments and international agencies. That aid is then used as the basis of a credit pyramiding scheme that not only provides micro-loans but also funds a creepy form of feminist social engineering that wars against children and marriage.
Contrary to legend, Yunus wasn't an independent entrepreneur when he started his bank. He used his personal wealth and high-level connections to arrange special privileges and millions in subsidies. Before the Grameen Bank lent one Taka, he had government backing for fully 60% of its operations.
The UN International Fund for Agricultural Development provided Grameen with its first major loan of $3.4 million. That Fund has consistently pumped money in ever since. In addition, Grameen receives grants and subsidized loans from the governments of Norway, Sweden, Canada, Germany, and even the Ford Foundation in the U.S., not to mention the IMF and World Bank.
If the funds aren't given as gifts to Grameen, they are lent at below-market rates, usually 2%. Grameen Bank then deposits that money in fixed-term and short-term accounts in commercial banks that pay higher rates. Grameen makes a killing by pocketing the difference.
The bank says this is merely arbitrage, but if private citizens did this with government funds, it would be called graft. These ill-gotten profits are then used to pay 12,000 staffers and subsidize the loan operations that everyone claims work so well.
Grameen charges its customers 20% interest, below the market in a country with high inflation and virtually no savings. At this rate, the reinvestment scheme subsidizes its loans by 39%. The bank is forever forecasting future profits. Somehow that day never arrives--which doesn't mean that its managers and top employees are doing charity work.
The 98% repayment figure does not reflect the behavior of actual individual borrowers. Grameen relies on the "peer group" method of repayment. Borrowers are lumped into cells of five. Any future loans--which offer 80% more money than the first one--depend on repayment by the entire cell.
If one person doesn't pay, others in the cell "lean" on them to fork over the cash, or pay it themselves. The person in the cell who wants another loan has the incentive to get all the money one way or another. In this way, Grameen does get paid. But the 98% repayment rate records final payments grouped by cells, and only on first-time loans.
The bank claims the system is "self policing." But observers note that its employees (many of them Western ne'er-do-wells in search of foreign utopias) engage in weekly, door-to-door monitoring of all borrowers. Even then, the payback rate for second-time borrowers is much lower.
E mais:
All this suggests the Grameen Bank is more of a cult than a financial institution. But let's consider its financial claims more carefully. It claims to be privately owned. But that's because borrowers are forced to buy at least one share in the bank. Currently about 88% of the bank's ownership is spread between 1.5 million borrowers, while the government still owns the other 12%. Borrowers cannot sell the shares they "own," however, and each borrower also pays a 5% "contribution" to a "cell group fund," plus 1% to a savings fund that pays no interest.
So let's say you're a borrower in Bangladesh. You, along with the four others in your credit cell, are approved for a loan of $75. After all mandatory payments are extracted, you end up with $69.50 in hand, which you must spend immediately, and an obligation to pay $90 to Grameen in one year. If all other members of the cell default, your liability zooms to $450. To make sure that doesn't happen, you have to spy on the other members (or worse) and tolerate being spied upon (or worse). You own one stock in Grameen Bank, but you can't sell it and neither does it earn dividends.
