Far Below Subprime, the Credit News Is Good

Who would have known that microfinance would evolve from charity to become a form of investment?

Even Muhammad Yunus -- the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner -- could not have predicted this when he was moved to make a small loan of $27 to a group of 42 families so they could survive by selling items in the marketplace during the Bangladesh famine of 1974. Professor Yunus, in his foreword to A Billion Bootstraps, wrote: "I have always maintained that poverty was not created by the poor, but by society's institutions that became a 'disabling environment' for them."

That was mirrored, in different words, by the late Milton Friedman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976: "The poor stay poor not because they are lazy, but because they have no access to capital."

Now that is changing.

Investors and lenders now see that new and solid profits are achievable, while at the same time helping those who seek a path to self-sufficiency and dignity through microfinance.