Felix Salmon of Reuters mentions David Roodman for his sophisticated, nuanced, and highly-informed views in this article on for-profit micro-finance
From the Article:
Muhammad Yunus has a heartfelt NYT op-ed railing against for-profit financiers. When he founded Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, he writes, “I never imagined that one day microcredit would give rise to its own breed of loan sharks. But it has.”
Yunus names the obvious names, such as Compartamos in Mexico and SKS in India, which have gone public, providing windfall profits for their founders with little if any benefit for their borrowers.
Yunus calls for stricter government regulation of microfinance entities, saying that their interest rate should be capped at 15 percentage points over their cost of funds. (Grameen manages on a spread of 10 percentage points.)
But Matthew Bishop, on his Philanthrocapitalism blog, pushes back hard against Yunus’s essay, with some rather peculiar arguments. (I’m assuming this is Bishop writing, and not his co-author Michael Green; the posts on the Philanthrocapitalism blog annoyingly don’t have bylines.)
Update: David Roodman has a sophisticated, nuanced, and highly-informed view, which — like all his stuff — is well worth reading.