Who Predicted the Financial Crisis - Economic ... - CEO Magazine

Muhammad Yunus
CEO of Grameen Bank
The Economist CEO
and the recipient of the
2006 Nobel Peace Prize
Company Profile
Industry: Financial
Services (Microcredit)
Employees: 24,700
Revenues: $ 9.8B
Market Cap: $ 6.7B
50 www.ceoqmagazine.com | Q4 / 2010
CEO Awards
Most Respected CEOs
Muhammad Yunus
Nobel Peace Prize Winner
Grameen Bank
A Special CEO Honor
Transforming the life of millions of
people; helping them fight poverty
while making a social profit.
“[Muhammad Yunus’] ideas have
already had a great impact on
the Third World, and...hearing his
appeal for a ‘poverty-free world’ from
the source itself can be as stirring as
that all-American myth of bootstrap
success.” ––The Washington Post
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton
was a vocal advocate for awarding
the Nobel Prize to Muhammad
Yunus. In a speech given at
University of California, Berkeley in
2002, President Clinton described
Dr. Yunus as “a man who long ago
should have won the Nobel Prize
[and] I’ll keep saying that until they
finally give it to him.”
Professor Muhammad Yunus is
internationally recognized for his
work in poverty alleviation and the
empowerment of poor women.
He successfully melded capitalism
with social responsibility to create
the Grameen Bank, a microcredit
institution committed to providing
small amounts of working capital to
the poor for self-employment.
From its origins as an action-research
project in 1976, Grameen Bank has
grown to provide collateral-free
loans to 7.5 million clients in more
than 82,072 villages in Bangladesh
and 97% of whom are women.
The successful and innovative
approach to poverty alleviation
pioneered by Professor Yunus
in a small village in Bangladesh
has inspired a global microcredit
movement reaching out to millions of
poor women in a hundred countries
throughout the world from rural
South Africa to inner city Chicago.
The unethical and risky derivative
financial practices of many bankers
proved toxic to their customers,
employees and investors. What
is sad is that the U.S. government
proposed the creation of the “Bad
Bank” to absorb all their toxic
assets.
US economists and government
policy makers can learn few lessons
from Muhammad Yunus by creating
the “Good bank”.
Not only it is a good socioeconomic
goal to serve the underserved
communities, it is also good for the
investors. With its $9B collateralfree
loans to 7.5 million clients and
amazing rate of 98% loan repayment rates (no
western bank can compete with that rate), the
Grameen bank could become the new model for
banking and economic development. - Med Jones
- President of International Institute of Management
CEO Bio
Born in 1940, Muhammad Yunus is a world famous
Bangladeshi banker. Professor Muhammad Yunus
received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 in Oslo,
Norway, for his pioneering work in fighting global
poverty through loans and other financial services
for the poor.
Microcredit involves the lending of small amounts
of money to the world’s poorest people to start
micro-businesses and move themselves away from
poverty.
He previously was a professor of economics where
he developed the concepts of microcredit and
microfinance.
He is one of the founding members of Global
Elders.
Yunus also serves on the board of directors of the
United Nations Foundation, a public charity created
in 1998 with entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted
Turner’s historic $1 billion gift to support United
Nations causes.
The UN Foundation builds and implements publicprivate
partnerships to address the world’s most
pressing problems, and broadens support for the
UN.
Yunus is the author of Banker to the Poor and a
founding board member of Grameen America and
Grameen Foundation.
CEO Insights
We have created a society that does
not allow opportunities for those people
to take care of themselves because we
have denied them those opportunities...I
wanted to give money to people like this
woman so that they would be free from
the moneylenders to sell their product at
the price which the markets gave them
- which was much higher than what the
trader was giving them
Sometimes I felt that nobody was paying
any attention, like I’ve been screaming
and nobody’s hearing me. Now suddenly
this prestigious [Noble Peace] prize
comes, and you get a feeling that you
can whisper, the whole world listens.
This is your time to say what you wanted
to say
Poverty is a threat to peace. It is a
breeding ground for political turmoil
I was teaching in one of the universities
while the country was suffering from a
severe famine. People were dying of
hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an
economist, I had no tool in my tool box to
fix that kind of situation
I went to the bank and proposed that
they lend money to the poor people. The
bankers almost fell over...
My greatest challenge has been to
change the mindset of people. Mindsets
play strange tricks on us. We see things
the way our minds have instructed our
eyes to see
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