Nick Scalco's List: osEconomy

• Many of those businesses serve local needs, which has more merit at a time when exports are collapsing. And microfinance’s reliance on peer pressure for repayment must be the envy of any mainstream banker struggling with rising foreclosures and “jingle mail”; delinquency rates are microscopic.
• About half the industry’s funding comes from aid budgets, but the share of private money is growing. The World Bank’s private arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) gave 55% more each year to microfinance lenders between 2004 and 2007.
• All this, some experts argue, should encourage the institutions to start raising funds by collecting deposits rather than relying on fickle markets or donors.

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• The economy we live in is a rigged game, established around the time of the Renaissance in order to promote the welfare of early-chartered corporations and the monarchs who gave them license to monopolize world business.
• Since the money would be worth less the following year than it is worth that day, the bias of the money was towards spending and reinvestment.
• European monarchs began to outlaw local currencies, and force everyone to use "coin of the realm." These centralized currencies had the opposite bias. They were borrowed into existence by businesses, and then paid back to the central bank, with interest.

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• a Chinese online social network called QQ produced “QQ coins” that became widely traded, used for almost a billion dollars a year in transactions
• Kenyans use a service called M-PESA that helps people swap mobile-phone minutes as cash— you can literally pay for something at the store by transferring mobile minutes to the clerk's phone. Today the M-PESA is used for $10 million worth of trades a day, a figure that translates out to $3.6 billion a year, or about 10 percent of the Kenyan GDP
• in China, it's illegal for people to gamble and view pornography, and yet the demand for them remains strong—hence, the rise of the QQ coin, which is perfect for buying both

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