Wealth & Money Quote by Muhammad Yunus

The sentence lands like a polite bureaucratic shrug, and Yunus weaponizes that politeness. “They explained to me” is doing more work than it seems: it frames the exclusion of the poor as something calmly taught, as if finance were a neutral science rather than a set of choices with winners and losers. The passive voice is the point. No one is refusing anyone; “the bank cannot,” as though the institution is bound by physics, not policy.

Then comes the loaded hinge: “creditworthy.” It’s a word that pretends to describe reality while actively producing it. If you’re poor, the system reads your lack of assets as a moral and statistical deficiency, and that label becomes a self-fulfilling barrier. Yunus is exposing how poverty gets reinterpreted as personal risk, allowing the financial sector to treat inequality as prudent management rather than as a design flaw.

The context is the late-20th-century development landscape Yunus confronted in Bangladesh, where formal banks served salaried, property-owning clients and wrote off the rural poor as unbankable. His intent isn’t just to criticize; it’s to spotlight the absurd circularity: people are poor because they can’t access capital; they can’t access capital because they’re poor. The quote’s subtext is an indictment of an industry that prides itself on allocating resources efficiently while systematically ignoring the economic potential of the majority. It’s also a quiet setup for Yunus’s counter-claim: that “creditworthiness” isn’t discovered, it’s constructed, and it can be constructed differently.