To Catch a Dollar: Muhammad Yunus Banks on America

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• 2010
• 1 hr 14 mins
• Documentary, Drama

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Professor Muhammad Yunus' never wanted to be a banker and he certainly never imagined winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet his quest to help the working poor invest in themselves led to both. Known as the father of microcredit loans in Bangladesh, Yunus spent years developing the Grameen Bank, and in 1983 it became a fully licensed bank with a twist-it was owned by its borrowers-mainly poor women. Yunus is famous for saying that in developing Grameen he deliberately did the opposite of what a conventional bank would do. Today, the success of Grameen Bank has changed the lives of 7.5 million Bangladeshi borrowers and their families (in 38 countries worldwide.- delete- it women in Bangladesh they added other countries and now there are 100million mc loans world-wide. But why stop at Bangladesh and poor nations? As the global financial industry struggles with plummeting markets and job loses, Yunus holds steady with his latest banking initiative in New York. Under intense scrutiny from international press and academics, Grameen America opened for business in a nondescript office building in Jackson Heights, Queens in late 2007. As the U.S. credit market crumbled and the giant banks of Wall Street faltered one by one, Grameen put 500 potential women borrowers into groups of five, with loans of up to $3,000 dispersed for small business ideas each of them (wanted to try) had developed. Following the Bangladeshi model, each group of five became its own loan committee, with the women making weekly payments and contributions to a mandatory savings account as they built their income generating activity. In one year, the Jackson Heights branch of Grameen America grew to loan over $1.5 million to 550 women. Just twelve months after opening, they've added two more branches in Brooklyn and Manhattan, with the plan to open as soon as possible (dozens of) other US cities in (the coming years) 2010. TO CATCH A DOLLAR follows the journey of two of these women borrowers and the changes their lives undergo over the course of a year. Working with borrowed money for the first time, they begin to realize their own potential and the power that comes with it. This is the inspiring, logic-defying yet true story of one man's idea, a strange new kind of bank, and the millions of lives it changed.