Thirty years ago the international development community was ecstatic. It had found the perfect market-affirming solution to poverty in developing countries: microcredit.

The popularizer of this new strategy — which consisted of providing small loans to the poor so they could launch self-employment ventures — was the US-trained Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, who portrayed microcredit as a panacea that would rapidly create an unlimited number of jobs and eradicate endemic poverty.

Yunus’s project of “bringing capitalism down to the poor” quickly turned him into the go-to-guy for advice on how best to address global poverty. In 1983, flush with funding, especially from US aid agencies and private foundations, Yunus established his own “bank for the poor” — the now-iconic Grameen Bank. Soon, Grameen clones, financed by the international donor community, sprang up across the Global South.