Credit markets were originally created to serve human needs; to provide businesses and individuals with capital to start or expand businesses or fulfill other financial needs.
Interpretation
Credit markets exist to meet the financial needs of individuals and businesses.
In this quote, Muhammad Yunus emphasizes the original intention behind credit markets, which is to cater to the financial requirements of people and enterprises. He underscores that these markets were created to facilitate access to capital, enabling economic growth and personal advancement, rather than being treated solely as profit-driven entities.
In practice
In a lecture about the fundamentals of economics.
Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.
What I did not know yet about hunger, but would find out over the next twenty-one years, was that brilliant theorists of economics do not find it worthwhile to spend time discussing issues of poverty and hunger. They believe that these will be resolved when general economic prosperity increases. These economists spend all their talents detailing the process of development and prosperity, but rarely reflect on the origin and development of poverty and hunger. A a result, poverty continues.
People.. were poor not because they were stupid or lazy. They worked all day long, doing complex physical tasks. They were poor because the financial institution in the country did not help them widen their economic base.
Some people think that poor people are lazy. Actually, it takes a lot of work to survive when you are dirt-poor.
Once poverty is gone, we'll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They'll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society - how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair.
By simply capitalizing on core strengths and knowledge, companies and entrepreneurs can engage in an emerging business model that will enable them to create - and demonstrate - real, sustainable social impact in society.
As the science of economics...exploded the fallacies of every brand of utopianism, it was outlawed and stigmatized as unscientific.
Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial society -- and the solution is laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., the abolition of any and all forms of intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State.
Paper money has had the effect in your State that it ever will have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open a door to every species of fraud and injustice.
No complaint... is more common than that of a scarcity of money.
So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free-enterprise system.
Some degree of inequality in income and wealth, of course, would occur even with completely equal opportunity because variations in effort, skill, and luck will produce variations in outcomes.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.