A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Wednesday has been building banking systems worldwide that directly involve the community by making microloans. For Muhammad Yunus, the effort began in his native country, Bangladesh, making small loans to those the traditional banks did not serve. In return for microloans, people worked their way out of poverty through intensive investment in what their communities could use.

Yunus later concentrated his loans with women borrowers, because he found that the largest amount of income was devoted to the family when women received the loans. I listened to him on CSpan Book TV a few days ago, and agreed completely as he described the Grameen Bank as involvement in the ‘real economy’.


When loans are invested in real industries, creating real wealth that has its equivalence in goods and services to the community, there is direct correspondence between the returns on the money and the benefits of it. As Yunus noted, imaginary money is what has brought disaster in the world’s detached economies. His microloans do not have the weakness of money manipulation, that trust that can be broken. For real assets, real money is earned, and real benefits ensue. Grameen Bank has a 97% repayment rate, as reported on WSJReport, and has not suffered as other banks have during the present economic disaster.

My greatest agreement with the concept of the microloan is Yunus’s basic precept: We are more than accumulators of wealth, and humanity needs to see success as more than just making money. As people, we need more than money, we need to gain in the values that money cannot give, but only assist us in gaining.

The poverty of our society has been its blindness to real values, real human need. When our government is warped into operating a system that diminishes the worker while elevating the moneyman, we are all impoverished.

The values of the microloan system are strange and uncomfortable to our country, but gradually the Grameen bank is being brought into a few urban areas here in the U.S. This system of growing real value has not failed in any place where it has operated, and it develops a human capacity our society badly needs.

The reversion to value given, value received economics has great promise for our society that has for so long been deprived of basic necessities in the mad rush for money.