Sometimes when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Thomas Dichter has a critique of the overhype of microcredit. Picked up via BoingBoing and Futurismic.

Yet microcredit is an almost perfect case of a phenomenon that has come to characterize much of development assistance - a widening gap between reality and propaganda. For while the promise of microcredit is irresistible - help the poor out of poverty using their own entrepreneurial energies, and in the process get our investment back - the hoped for poverty reduction impact of microcredit remains elusive.