Microfinance: Where Do We Stand Today?

In the last ten years, conventional wisdom has held that microfinance as an asset class enjoys a striking lack of correlation with trends in the global economy. The informality of most of the microbusinesses feeding into the microfinance industry was supposed to shield it to a certain degree from macroeconomic booms and busts. Challenging this assertion, however, is another tenet that emerged from the decade of Long Term Capital Management, which holds that in bad times, everything correlates. With waves of the international financial crisis rippling through the global economy, read more...