The Wiki Man | 1 November 2008

An amazing piece of financial analysis has been circulating by email recently.

If you had purchased $1,000 worth of AIG stock a year ago, you would have $44.34 left.

With Wachovia, you would have had $54.74 left of the original $1,000.

With Lehman, you would have had $0.00 left.

But if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year, drunk all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminium recycling refund, you would have $214 cash.

Even better, if a year ago you had decided to entrust your $1,000 to the needy rather than the greedy, you would have ended up today with $1,000.

This market-beating 0 per cent rate of return is available through a website called www.kiva.org. It’s a site dedicated not to charitable giving but to charitable lending — and to the refreshingly entrepreneurial idea that if you want to feed a man, the best thing isn’t to give him a fish, or even to teach him to fish, but to lend him the money to buy a net.

Or perhaps a fridge.

‘Tajeddin Babayev is a meat and fish vendor at the bazaar in the north-easterly Azerbaijani town of Khachmaz. He is 51 years old, married with three children and has been a vendor for the last 12 years. He is currently looking for funding in the amount of $725 in order to purchase a refrigerator for his business and to make some minor repairs.’

All prospective borrowers on the site are introduced with little written portraits like this, alongside a photograph. Hence, unlike money deposited with a conventional bank, it provides an emotional return on your investment: the pleasure of seeing where your money goes. It’s a little like It’s a Wonderful Life in miniature.