Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
The remarkable life story of one visionary economist and his simple but revolutionary tool to end world poverty: micro-credit. In 1983, against the advice of banking and government officials, Yunus established Grameen, a bank devoted to providing the poorest of Bangladesh with miniscule loans. Grameen Bank, based on the belief that credit is a basic human right, not the privilege of a fortunate few, now provides over 2.5 billion dollars of micro-loans to more than two million families in rural Bangladesh. Ninety-four percent of Yunus’s clients are women, and repayment rates are near 100 percent. Around the world, micro-lending programs inspired by Grameen are blossoming, with more than three hundred programs established in the United States alone.
Banker to the Poor is Muhammad Yunus’s memoir of how he decided to change his life in order to help the world’s poor. In it he traces the intellectual and spiritual journey that led him to fundamentally rethink the economic relationship between rich and poor, and the challenges he and his colleagues faced in founding Grameen. He also provides wise, hopeful guidance for anyone who would like to join him in “putting homelessness and destitution in a museum so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long.” The definitive history of micro-credit direct from the man that conceived of it, Banker to the Poor is necessary and inspirational reading for anyone interested in economics, public policy, philanthropy, social history, and business. 8 pp. photos.It began with a simple loan. After witnessing the cycle of poverty that kept many poor women enslaved to high-interest loan sharks in Bangladesh, Dr. Muhammad Yunus lent money to 42 women so they could purchase bamboo to make and sell stools. In a short time, the women were able to repay the loans while continuing to support themselves and their families. With that initial eye-opening success, the seeds of the Grameen Bank, and the concept of microcredit, were planted.
After earning a Ph.D. in economics at Vanderbilt University, Dr. Yunus returned to Bangladesh to settle into a life as a professor. But a famine in 1974 ravaged the country, leading Dr. Yunus to alter his thinking and his life profoundly: “What good were all my complex theories when people were dying of starvation on the sidewalks and porches across from my lecture hall?…. Nothing in the economic theories I taught reflected the life around me.” Armed with little more than a lofty dream to end the suffering around him, he started an experimental microcredit enterprise in 1977; by 1983 the Grameen Bank was officially formed.
The idea behind the Grameen Bank is ingeniously simple: extend credit to poor people and they will help themselves. This concept strikes at the root of poverty by specifically targeting the poorest of the poor, providing small loans (usually less than 0) to those unable to obtain credit from traditional banks. At Grameen, loans are administered to groups of five people, with only two receiving their money up front. As soon as these two make a few regular payments, loans are gradually extended to the rest of the group. In this way, the program builds a sense of community as well as individual self-reliance. Most of the Grameen Bank’s loans are to women, and since its inception, there has been an astonishing loan repayment rate of over 98 percent.
Banker to the Poor is an inspiring memoir of the birth of microcredit, written in a conversational tone that makes it both moving and enjoyable to read. The Grameen Bank is now a .5 billion banking enterprise in Bangladesh, while the microcredit model has spread to over 50 countries worldwide, from the U.S. to Papua New Guinea, Norway to Nepal. Ever optimistic, Yunus travels the globe spreading the belief that poverty can be eliminated: “…the poor, once economically empowered, are the most determined fighters in the battle to solve the population problem; end illiteracy; and live healthier, better lives. When policy makers finally realize that the poor are their partners, rather than bystanders or enemies, we will progress much faster that we do today.” Dr. Yunus’s efforts prove that hope is a global currency. –Shawn Carkonen
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Categories: Loan Products Tags: against, Banker, Battle, loans, MicroLending, poor, Poverty, Price, World
Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (New in Paper)
Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (New in Paper)
Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it’s tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. In Fault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren’t fixed.
Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown–made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners–were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose. He traces the deepening fault lines in a world overly dependent on the indebted American consumer to power global economic growth and stave off global downturns. He exposes a system where America’s growing inequality and thin social safety net create tremendous political pressure to encourage easy credit and keep job creation robust, no matter what the consequences to the economy’s long-term health; and where the U.S. financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an overstimulated America and an underconsuming world.
In Fault Lines, Rajan demonstrates how unequal access to education and health care in the United States puts us all in deeper financial peril, even as the economic choices of countries like Germany, Japan, and China place an undue burden on America to get its policies right. He outlines the hard choices we need to make to ensure a more stable world economy and restore lasting prosperity.
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925 Ideas to Help You Save Money, Get Out of Debt and Retire A Millionaire: So You Can Leave Your Mark on the World
925 Ideas to Help You Save Money, Get Out of Debt and Retire A Millionaire: So You Can Leave Your Mark on the World
Devin Thorpe has collected over 150 essays on personal and family finance to help you learn how to be happier with your money, to live more frugally and investment more wisely. 925 Ideas… is an easy and readable guide to help your family find financial peace. Author Devin D. Thorpe explains: 1) how you and your spouse can find agreement on money matters, 2) how to teach your kids about money, 3) how to pay for your children’s college education, 4) how to live like a millionaire (spoiler alert! Frugally) 5) how to come up with ,000 in a crisis 6) how to make ends meet on one income 7) how to get out of debt and stay out of debt 8) why home ownership should be your family’s top financial priority 9) how to ask your boss for a raise 10) how to use your finances to do more good in the world. And much more! Devin D. Thorpe is the author of the highly regarded book, Your Mark on the World and is the founder of the Your Mark on the World Organization, championing social good. The Your Mark on the World Organization believes that people, no matter their level of income, can give more and do more to make the world a better place. The empowering lessons of 925 Ideas will enable you to leave your mark on the world.
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Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism
Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism
In the last two decades, free markets have swept the globe. But traditional capitalism has been unable to solve problems like inequality and poverty. In Muhammad Yunus’ groundbreaking sequel to Banker to the Poor, he outlines the concept of social businessbusiness where the creative vision of the entrepreneur is applied to today’s most serious problems: feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick, and protecting the planet. Creating a World Without Poverty reveals the next phase in a hopeful economic and social revolution that is already underway.
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Categories: Loan Products Tags: Business, Capitalism, Creating, Future, Poverty, social, without, World, World Without Poverty
Real World Banking and Finance: A Dollars & Sense Reader, 5th Edition Reviews
Real World Banking and Finance: A Dollars & Sense Reader, 5th Edition
Where is the financial services industry headed? What does the subprime lending crisis that exploded in 2007 have in common with the savings and loan scandals of the 1980s? Can the stock market fund the baby boomers’ retirement? Does it matter if the dollars falls in value? How do the actions of the major global financial institutions compare to their stated missions of fostering economic development and fighting poverty?
Real World Banking and Finance, 5th edition provides lively answers to these questions, assembling 55 sharply written, well-researched articles on banking and finance from the pages of Dollars & Sense, the leading magazine of popular economics.
In these pages you will follow the continued consolidation of the banking industry in the post-Glass Steagall era, examine the subprime and predatory lending sector, and take an in-depth look at retirement finance. You will also find thoughtful proposals for restructuring the financial system to make it more effective and more democratic. And you will grasp the basics–money, the Fed, interest rates, the stock market–more clearly thanks to Dollars & Sense‘s accurate, jargon-free explanations.
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Out-of-Court Debt Restructuring (World Bank Studies)
Out-of-Court Debt Restructuring (World Bank Studies)
This study provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of the questions of out-of-court debt restructuring from a policy-oriented perspective. The starting point of the analysis is given by the World Bank Principles for Effective Insolvency and Creditor Rights Systems. The study offers an overview of out-of-court restructuring, which is not seen as fundamentally opposed to formal insolvency procedures. Actually, the study contemplates different restructuring techniques as forming a continuum to the treatment of financial difficulties. Thus, from the purely contractual or informal arrangements for debt rescheduling between the debtor and its creditors, to the fully formal reorganization or liquidation procedures, there are numerous intermediate solutions. In the study, these solutions are identified by the terms of enhanced procedures where the contractual arrangements are supported by norms or principles for workouts; and hybrid procedures where the contractual arrangements are supported by the intervention of the courts or an administrative authority. The study discusses the advantages and disadvantages of all the debt restructuring techniques, and concludes, in this regard, that a legal system may contain a number of options a menu that can cover different sets of circumstances. In the end, the law may offer a toolbox with very different instruments that the parties may use depending on the specific facts of the case. A substantial part of the study is devoted to the analysis of the enabling regulatory environment for out-of-court restructuring. It is evident that debt restructuring does not operate in a vacuum: in fact, the general legal system influences and to a certain extent determines the possibilities for debt restructuring in any given jurisdiction. The study provides a checklist that can be used to examine the features of a legal system that bear a direct influence on debt restructuring activities. The different characteristics of informal restructurings, and of enhanced and hybrid debt restructurings are covered by the study. The different approaches to debt restructuring aim at combining the advantages of an informal approach with the advantages of formal procedures: especially, the existence of a moratorium on creditor actions and the binding effects of creditor agreements concluded within the insolvency process.
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Categories: Loan Products Tags: bank, Debt, OutofCourt, Restructuring, Studies, World
Sustainable Wealth: Achieve Financial Security in a Volatile World of Debt and Consumption
Sustainable Wealth: Achieve Financial Security in a Volatile World of Debt and Consumption
A personal finance guide for today’s turbulent world
Sustainable Wealth empowers you to achieve your financial goals by unleashing the shackles of debt, no matter how uncertain the future may be. Filled with in-depth insights and practical advice, this reliable resource illustrates how you can predict economic booms and busts before they happen, adapt to changing markets and plan for lasting financial stability.
Over the course of his career, Axel Merk has been at the forefront of identifying major trends, a leader in the public policy debate on how to fix the economy, and guide for investors looking to navigate the global credit crisis. With this new book, Merk puts your financial decisions in a global context and shows how factors ranging from the Federal Reserve and Congress to trends in Asia and Europe influence your financial well-being.
- Coaches you how to recognize major economic trends before they happen
- Puts forth a plan to help you cope with expenses and save for retirement, while building a legacy of wealth, not a mountain of debt
- Reveals why “staying the course” when governments or markets change the rules may be hazardous to your wealth
As investors struggle to adapt to the new financial landscape, Sustainable Wealth provides straightforward answers to the tough financial questions we face-and the tools to achieve a financially sustainable lifestyle.
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Categories: Loan Products Tags: Achieve, Consumption, Debt, Financial, security, Sustainable, Volatile, Wealth, World
Banker To The Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty Reviews
Banker To The Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
- ISBN13: 9781586481988
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Muhammad Yunus is that rare thing: a bona fide visionary. His dream is the total eradication of poverty from the world. In 1983, against the advice of banking and government officials, Yunus established Grameen, a bank devoted to providing the poorest of Bangladesh with minuscule loans. Grameen Bank, based on the belief that credit is a basic human right, not the privilege of a fortunate few, now provides over 2.5 billion dollars of micro-loans to more than two million families in rural Bangladesh. Ninety-four percent of Yunus’s clients are women, and repayment rates are near 100 percent. Around the world, micro-lending programs inspired by Grameen are blossoming, with more than three hundred programs established in the United States alone.
Banker to the Poor is Muhammad Yunus’s memoir of how he decided to change his life in order to help the world’s poor. In it he traces the intellectual and spiritual journey that led him to fundamentally rethink the economic relationship between rich and poor, and the challenges he and his colleagues faced in founding Grameen. He also provides wise, hopeful guidance for anyone who would like to join him in “putting homelessness and destitution in a museum so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long.” The definitive history of micro-credit direct from the man that conceived of it, Banker to the Poor is necessary and inspirational reading for anyone interested in economics, public policy, philanthropy, social history, and business.
Muhammad Yunus was born in Bangladesh and earned his Ph.D. in economics in the United States at Vanderbilt University, where he was deeply influenced by the civil rights movement. He still lives in Bangladesh, and travels widely around the world on behalf of Grameen Bank and the concept of micro-credit.
It began with a simple loan. After witnessing the cycle of poverty that kept many poor women enslaved to high-interest loan sharks in Bangladesh, Dr. Muhammad Yunus lent money to 42 women so they could purchase bamboo to make and sell stools. In a short time, the women were able to repay the loans while continuing to support themselves and their families. With that initial eye-opening success, the seeds of the Grameen Bank, and the concept of microcredit, were planted.
After earning a Ph.D. in economics at Vanderbilt University, Dr. Yunus returned to Bangladesh to settle into a life as a professor. But a famine in 1974 ravaged the country, leading Dr. Yunus to alter his thinking and his life profoundly: “What good were all my complex theories when people were dying of starvation on the sidewalks and porches across from my lecture hall?…. Nothing in the economic theories I taught reflected the life around me.” Armed with little more than a lofty dream to end the suffering around him, he started an experimental microcredit enterprise in 1977; by 1983 the Grameen Bank was officially formed.
The idea behind the Grameen Bank is ingeniously simple: extend credit to poor people and they will help themselves. This concept strikes at the root of poverty by specifically targeting the poorest of the poor, providing small loans (usually less than 0) to those unable to obtain credit from traditional banks. At Grameen, loans are administered to groups of five people, with only two receiving their money up front. As soon as these two make a few regular payments, loans are gradually extended to the rest of the group. In this way, the program builds a sense of community as well as individual self-reliance. Most of the Grameen Bank’s loans are to women, and since its inception, there has been an astonishing loan repayment rate of over 98 percent.
Banker to the Poor is an inspiring memoir of the birth of microcredit, written in a conversational tone that makes it both moving and enjoyable to read. The Grameen Bank is now a .5 billion banking enterprise in Bangladesh, while the microcredit model has spread to over 50 countries worldwide, from the U.S. to Papua New Guinea, Norway to Nepal. Ever optimistic, Yunus travels the globe spreading the belief that poverty can be eliminated: “…the poor, once economically empowered, are the most determined fighters in the battle to solve the population problem; end illiteracy; and live healthier, better lives. When policy makers finally realize that the poor are their partners, rather than bystanders or enemies, we will progress much faster that we do today.” Dr. Yunus’s efforts prove that hope is a global currency. –Shawn Carkonen
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Categories: Loan Products Tags: against, Banker, Battle, MicroLending, poor, Poverty, Reviews, World
Payday Advances Introduce Us To A World Of Speed
The world has moved from the traditional bank loans that have taken forever to process to the new loans that are available almost instantaneously. This is a development that had to be seen in the near future because customers always got very impatient. The impatience ended when everything went online. The online market is a market serving all those restless people who have very busy schedules. This is the whole problem about the old traditional means of getting loans. Long queues and boring formalities are just few of the many problems that people hate to face, while already running short of funds.
The concept about online loans is very simple. People want processes to be cut short and also to get quickened. This is the reason why these loans were made in the first place. For the people who are always looking for quicker options and faster means of getting things done, this is the best option possible. Not only in the field of loans but also in other services. Internet services went from normal dial up connections to broadband connections, and then it touched 3G and now 4G. The quicker the better. Nowadays payday advances can be got in a matter of an hour or so, this is what is being marketed all over the globe. When a product gets better, the easiest way to sell it is to mention its speed. The all-new payday loans have taken the name instant payday loans.
The name instant payday loans mean it become faster than usual. Many payday advance lenders offer money within short spans of time, but everything cannot be trusted blindly. Security issues must also be considered before such fast online cash is turned to. There are small charges that are applied to make such fast transfers happen, besides the necessity that the bank in which the customer has an account as well must activate the service. Security doubts on payday advances can be clarifies by just checking the website of the lender for all details. This involves the checking for valid registered license number and a data security license.
The processes involved in these payday advance loans are so simple that many people are attracted to it instantly. The ability to have money in ones account in a span of one hour can mean giving a lot of power to people in general. The strength to face sudden fluctuations in income or unexpected expenditure increases with the usage of these payday advances. Instant payday loans also help in serving people who feel their credit histories must be improved. The lenders make it a point to report positively to credit bureaus once they are sure that the customer is a good customer. Regular payments of installments and not defaulting on any payday are what can make customers look better to credit bureaus in general.
Written by KittiSteven
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Small Loans, Big Dreams: How Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus and Microfinance are Changing the World Reviews
Small Loans, Big Dreams: How Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus and Microfinance are Changing the World
Microfinancing is considered one of the most effective strategies in the fight against global poverty. And now, in Small Loans, Big Changes, author Alex Counts reveals how Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus revolutionized global antipoverty efforts through the development of this approach. This book presents compelling stories of women benefiting from Yunus’s microcredit in rural Bangladesh and urban Chicago, and recounts the experiences of different borrowers in each country, interspersing them with stories of Yunus, his colleagues, and their counterparts in Chicago.
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