David Roodman's Microfinance Open Book Blog

Vijay Mahajan:

“Here I am in the middle way, Having had twenty years, Twenty years largely wasted… The years of l’entre deux guerres”. TS Eliot’s lines come to mind and it metamorphoses into “Here I am at the end of the way, Having had thirty years, Thirty years largely wasted… The years of les guerres de l’interne”

In my last post I wrote that microcredit bubbles are unusual among credit bubbles in not being linked to salable assets such as houses. I was wrong. In the late 1970s and early 1980s western and Japanese banks got very enthusiastic about lending to foreign governments, which, like poor people without collateral, are hard to foreclose on. Funny, this symmetry between the mightiest and weakest borrowers.

A spirited case against the proposition that the Indian microcredit is overheating, from Sucharita Mukherjee and Kirthi Rao of IFMR Capital: