Noble Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus was his level-headed
provocative self this morning when my colleague, Jay Greene, and I met
him at the Sheraton Hotel around the corner from our office. We asked
him: How can the advocates for the poor capitalize on the downturn? His
answer was that the financial system should be reformed in ways to make
it more inclusive. "If the institutions have failed. let's not go back
to the same thing. Let's fix it. Let's build the bank as an inclusive
institution. Let's extend their services to people who don't have them
now." He says government regulators and policy makers should make some
of their help to banks contingent on their willingness to extend
services to the poor so they don't have to relay on the loan sharks
who operate pay-day loan operations and pawn shops. "The government
should say, 'If you expand we'll help you. If you don't, we won't,'" Yunus says.

Unfortunately, most of the help that the US government is going to
give banks has already been doled out, so the opportunity to do
something constructive may be lost. And, also, unfortunately, banks
making sub-prime loans to people who shouldn't haven gotten them was
one of the things that got us in this big mess. But, still, Yunus is
right that now is the time for the government and the banks to consider
new approaches that would extend banking services to the poor without
causing unmanageable risk to the banking system.

I don't hear anybody else talking about that. It's a shame about wise men.
They're often honored but not heeded.

I attended BusinessWeek's Captains of Industry event at the 92nd Street Y last evening. BW editor in chief Steve Adler interviewed Citigroup's Vikram Pandit, the guy who didn't screw up Citi but has to fix it. Pandit is a boring interview. Very careful. Must have thrilled the Citi PR woman who was sitting next to me. He said one interesting thing, though. When asked where he sees the biggest growth opportunities for Citi, he said it's going to be the emerging markets like India and China. They're not the emerging markets, really, any more. They have emerged. Then he made an interesting prediction: Africa will follow Asia on the path to economic development. He named South Africa, northern Africa, and West Africa as interesting spots to Citi. Memo to the enterprising: Get in now.

Here's what Kagame wrote in Huffington Post: http://tinyurl.com/l4egt7