The New York Times quoted senior fellow David Roodman in an article on microcredit.
From the Article:
Done right, the loans have shown promise in allowing some borrowers to build sustainable livelihoods. But it has also become clear that the rapid growth of microcredit — in India, some lending companies were growing at 60 percent to 100 percent a year — has made the loans much less effective. Most borrowers do not appear to be climbing out of poverty, and a sizable minority of them are getting trapped in a spiral of debt, according to studies and analysts.
“Credit is both the source of possibilities and it’s a bond,” said David Roodman, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a research organization in Washington. “Credit is often operating at this knife’s edge, and that gets forgotten.”
And with the results for borrowers mixed, some lenders have minted profits that might make Wall Street bankers envious. For instance, investors in the largest microcredit company in India, SKS Microfinance, sold shares last year for as much as 95 times what had been paid for them a few years earlier.