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But profitability is just one half of the explanation for the microcredit model’s widespread support among policymakers, politicians, and ordinary people. The issue of ideology is also central.

Microcredit is supremely attractive to the neoliberal development community and neoliberal politicians…

[...] The reality behind the microcredit hype is that the vast majority of those who took out a microloan to invest in some income-generating project ended up failing or else displacing other struggling informal microenterprises operating in the same sector.

Unfortunately, Yunus had embraced a long-disproven fallacy known as Say’s law — the idea that supply creates its own demand. As the late economist Alice Amsden explained, the core problem in developing countries is not the supply of basic items, but the sheer lack of local demand (or purchasing power) required to pay for them.

The movement reached its apotheosis in November 2006 at the Microcredit Summit in Halifax, Canada