Filed under: Industry, Housing
With all the negative headlines that the subprime lending industry is getting lately — and deservedly so — it’s easy to forget about how important it is. Without question, the availability of credit can be an extremely potent force in the battle for upward mobility.
For 25 years, Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank have been doing subprime lending right: making small loans to people in developing countries to give them a chance to start their own businesses and provide for their families — About 97% of Grameen’s borrowers are women.
This weekend’s Wall Street Journal reports that “Mr. Yunus has now brought Grameen to this borough of New York City. Since taking off in January, Grameen America has lent out a total of $145,000, with interest rates at around 15% on the declining loan balance. The money will be used for everything from taxi registrations to sewing machines.”
Reading Mr. Yunus’s interview with the Journal – where he opines on the American subprime mess — I can’t help but feel crotchety about how badly we’ve messed up lending in this country. Yunus has built an institution with an extremely low default rates based on loans to driven entrepreneurs.
Here, liberal lending standards have served a different purpose — letting people buy homes with no money down and ARMs, lest they not be able to replace their SUV each year in an effort to come up with a down payment. What’s that? You’d rather spend money on consumer goods than mortgage payments? No problem! One negative amortization loan, coming right up!
Grameen works hard to provide people willing to make sacrifices with the credit needed to fulfill their dreams and give their children a better life. The entitlement and shortsightedness of the American consumer has led debt — one of the most powerful wealth-building tools in the world — to become an instrument for acquiring a superior Coach purse.
We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.
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