Nobody in Hafizur Rahman’s family asked too many questions when the money they sent home to Bangladesh doubled or even tripled within two to three months. “He was like a prince,” says Mirza Golam Sabur of his brother-in-law. So when Sabur was told last May that his 55-year-old brother-in-law died suddenly of a heart attack, he was shocked. Shocking, too, was the discovery that the tens of thousands of dollars sent to Rahman by relatives in Europe and North America was largely gone. The funds that they planned to use to buy retirement homes for relatives in the southern port city of Khulna had disappeared in Bangladesh’s volatile stock market.
Woeful tales like the Rahmans’ are multiplying across Bangladesh as the country’s benchmark stock index, which has dropped 55% since early 2011, continues to fall. Although Bangladesh has seen booms and busts before during its stock exchange’s 58-year history, the steep losses suffered over the past 12 months by millions of small investors threaten to bring fresh economic and political turmoil to a long-suffering nation that seemed, at last, to be gaining ground. (Watch TIME’s video “Fleeing Catastrophe, Stuck in the Slums of Bangladesh.”)
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