Following the 2008 Financial Crisis, news broke that big banks in the US were collecting hundreds of billions of dollars from non-profit parties. These enormous sums represented annual settlement and termination payments for bilateral contracts known as Interest Rate Swaps (IRSs). Starting in the late 1990s, big banks targeted non-profits for massive sales of all types of such contracts. Non-profits ended up being perennial losers, eventually owing enormous sums of money to the banks for nothing received.The effects of such monetary transfers have been disastrous -- money-strapped non-profits had to dismiss schoolteachers, shut off water supply to thousands of poor households and downsize many other essential public services. For example, over 108 public school districts and 105 government agencies in the state of Pennsylvania suffered massive losses because of dealing in IRSs. Local and state governments, universities, hospitals and transit authorities from New York to San Francisco have been and are among the largest hit. Moreover, about 500 hospitals ranging from charity to large healthcare centers became victims of bank-generated swap contracts.

Members of the Service Employee International Union identified the curse of IRS payments to big banks as being 'Money for Nothing.'This book discusses selective cases of the costly undertaking of many, many non-profits whose officials were not informed that an IRS contract has only one winner, and that big banks had no intention of being the losers. The author lends support that, curiously, officials of non-profits relied heavily on the banks' self-serving representations with respect to IRS contracts. There is no evidence that any of these officials, and their advisors, fully understood the complexities, terms and nuances of IRS contracts offered by big banks. As a result, the contracting parties did not have equal bargaining power. Therefore, should not IRS contracts with non-profits be considered unconscionable contracts? Moreover, once an IRS is terminated, the presumed services of hedging, managing risk and betting would terminate. Thus, the huge sums of money big banks had collected for termination, based on the duration from the time of termination to maturity, were taken for services that had not been, and will never be, rendered. Could one then consider these termination payments tantamount to unjust enrichment?.