At Dealbreaker, Greg Michaels asks an important question:
“A day after people threw both questions and shoes at IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, he said that the organization’s new mandate is to be the global lender of last resort.
The international monetary system must be more stable, and anchored by a global lender of last resort,” he said, outlining his vision for the IMF.
So now we’re going to have the IMF there to cushion the world from another near economic meltdown. It’s a simple as that. Problem solved. What could possibly go wrong.”
The microcredit craze that has taken off lately, it’s somewhat a popular trendy thing that supporters seem to still “believe in” even though it is now being presented as something that does not work, for the most part. I view the microcredits deal as a small scale version of the IMF, only too many people in high places benifit from the IMF for it to ever be proclaimed a failure.
Here is a small snipit making the rounds showing how the microcredits scheme doesn’t work (subsitiute IMF for microcredits and they are the same):
What they find is that, by most measures, microcredit does not offer a way out of poverty. It helps a few of the more entrepreneurial poor to start up businesses, and at the margins it may boost the profits of existing microenterprises, but that doesn’t translate into gains for the borrowers, as measured by indicators like income, spending, health, or education. In fact, most microcredit clients actually spend their borrowed money not on a business, but on household expenses, on paying off other debts or on a relatively big-ticket item like a TV or a daughter’s wedding. And while microcredit champions point to microloans as a tool for empowering women, the studies see no impact on gender roles, and find evidence that if any one group benefits more, it’s male entrepreneurs with existing businesses.
http://www.publicradio.org/columns/marketplace/scratchpad/2009/10/itsy_bitsy_loans.html
I saw that yunnus bashing piece on Lew’s site. I think he’s quite mistaken,
and I plan on posting why.
Yunnus is not a bankster …
and the program might have its flaws but the Boston Globe’s reporting on it is very slanted..
and there’s a reason why..
back later
I look forward to it. The program did make sense in one way when I first heard about it, the free market deciding who gets loans and who does not, but… real wealth comes from savings, not debt.
Perhaps the Boston Globe story was originally about the IMF, but the editor stopped it at the last minute by swapping out IMF for microcredit?
So far nothing has beaten the washing machine for lifting up women?