Wealth & Money Quote by Muhammad Yunus

The line lands because it treats a moral absurdity as a physical gag: bankers "almost fell over" at the mere suggestion that the poor might be credible borrowers. Yunus compresses an entire ideology into one punchy scene. The humor isn’t decorative; it’s a pressure test. If an idea that sounds obviously constructive triggers laughter in a bank, the institution has quietly admitted what it believes people are for: profit extraction, not participation.

The intent is strategic provocation. Yunus isn’t just recounting a meeting; he’s staging the origin myth of microcredit as a confrontation with common sense that has been trained by decades of risk models, collateral requirements, and class bias. The subtext is that finance presents itself as rational and neutral, yet it operates with a cultural imagination so narrow that "poor" is automatically translated to "unbankable". Their near-collapse reads as involuntary honesty.

Context matters: Yunus’s work grows out of Bangladesh in the 1970s, after famine and amid limited formal credit for rural women and laborers. Traditional banks weren’t merely cautious; they were structurally uninterested, designed to serve those who already had assets. By framing the bankers’ reaction as slapstick, Yunus highlights the mismatch between finance’s self-image (modern, scientific, developmental) and its actual social boundary policing.

It works because it flips the burden of proof. Instead of the poor having to prove trustworthiness, the bankers have to explain why their disbelief is so reflexive. The joke is on them, but the indictment is on the system.