Wealth & Money Quote by Muhammad Yunus

“Business money is limitless” lands like a provocation precisely because it hijacks the language of scarcity that usually polices moral imagination. Muhammad Yunus isn’t claiming cash literally never runs out; he’s puncturing the convenient story we tell ourselves: that poverty persists because resources are naturally finite, not because systems are designed to funnel capital toward already-profitable outcomes.

The intent is tactical. Yunus, architect of microcredit and a public evangelist for social business, is arguing that markets can mobilize staggering sums when there’s a credible mechanism for return. Venture capital appears overnight. Bailouts materialize on command. Mega-projects get financed because they fit the grammar investors understand: risk, reward, scale. By contrast, funding for the poor is treated as charity, capped by guilt and donor fatigue. Yunus is flipping that frame: if we structure poverty solutions as enterprises with discipline, cash flow, and accountability, capital becomes renewable rather than episodic.

The subtext is also an indictment of “impact” as performance. Corporate social responsibility and philanthropy often function as reputational spending, carefully budgeted and easily cut. Yunus is insisting on a harder standard: bake social goals into business models so they can compete for real money, not leftover money.

Context matters: coming from Bangladesh, where development rhetoric often arrived as paternalistic aid, Yunus’s line is a demand for agency. It’s a wager that the same financial creativity used to optimize profits can be repurposed to optimize dignity. The sting is implicit: we don’t lack money. We lack the will to design institutions that let it reach people who have been priced out of possibility.