Microcredit has had no subprime crisis, quipped Muhammad Yunus
Technology will continue to transform the world and “Silicon Valley will be the midwife in creating that world,” Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus said Tuesday.
Yunus is best known as the founder of Grameen Bank and the pioneer of microcredit – the financial innovation that has helped thousands of third-world women find their way out of poverty by loaning them small amounts of money to build businesses.
Yunus was in Silicon Valley to receive the James Morgan Global Humanitarian Award. He said that if someone wanted to predict the future, she might be best advised to “sit down and write a wild science fiction” novel. That is what Silicon Valley is creating as the technology it creates finds its way into the small of village in the most remote place.
With his financial grounding, he also turned the tables on the so-called monetary sophistication of the West. He said he recalls being told 30 years ago that poor people were not credit worthy and that his micro-credit revolution would be doomed to failure.
It turns out they were the better risk, he said, referring to the turmoil spawned on Wall Street by the credit crisis and the collapse of the home loan market.
Grameen has given thousands of home loans and “we never had a subprime crisis,” he said.
