Friday Goat

To make up for not having one last week, here's three.

It's like a peanut butter sandwich of goats!

Proverbs

Kiva's Twitter is in large part a proverb-sharing device.  There's too much inspiration and too little Don Rickles for my taste, but that seems to be how people communicate in this milieu.

They evidently aren't getting these things off the top of their head, because they want you to contribute.  Here's a form.

I've already offered my contribution:

"I teach the truth to the youth.  I say, 'Hey youth, here's the truth.'  Then I start wearing bulletproof."
-Ol' Dirty Bastard

App!

Now you fancy types with your high-falutin iPhones never have to be away from Kiva.  Here's the Kiva Alerts app.  It is, and I quote, "a super quick application that allows you to check the latest loan requests on Kiva.org. Loan requests on Kiva.org get fulfilled very quickly and we update open loan requests every few minutes so that you can find the loans of your interest quickly as they appear."

So there you go.  My phone can't handle something like this, but maybe you'll enjoy it.

I'm typing this on a Tandy.

Relevant to My Interest

LiveMint had a comment about the main microfinance issue of the day: interest rates.

Microfinance proponents such as Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus have objected to these high rates. But Yunus’ formula of a less than 10% interest rate spread for an MFI to be in the green zone of socioeconomic acceptability has had few takers other than Grameen itself. Mexico’s Banco Compartamos, for instance, has made its fortunes charging rates in excess of 85%.

85%!  You can see why some people have an issue with this.  I'm not talking about dumb guys like "Vincent Van Noir" from the other day, because I don't care what they think.  More like this guy, who's not dumb.

In fact, Yunus’ formula loses out for its poor practicality. Large numbers of very small loans demand high rates, and artificially lowering rates may disincentivize MFIs from expanding their reach to the very poor.

This analysis pretty much matches where I think I'm at on this issue.  Microfinance institutions are charging high interest because they need to make money.  When you have small-dollar, short-term loans, high rates are the only way to do that.  A lot of the opposition to this system seems to come from people who have a reflexive distrust of the profit motive.  I don't.

Here's an opposing view.

Outpacing, Outsourcing

Julia's outpacing me to an embarrassing degree.  A really embarrassing degree, actually.  But it's not a contest, right?  RIGHT?!

I haven't watched this yet, but it might be interesting.  How about you watch it first and let me know if I should bother.