Suy Sokna at her sister-in-law’s house in central Cambodia. The 32-year-old storekeeper says she was pressured to sell her own home to repay a microfinance loan she signed with a thumbprint because she can barely read or write.
Photographer: Cindy Liu/Bloomberg
JPMorgan’s $175 Million CLO Packaged Pain Into Profit
A collateralized loan obligation was backed by payments to microfinance companies that charged high interest rates and pressured borrowers to sell their homes.
The Mansion at Glen Cove on Long Island’s Gold Coast, with its landscaped gardens, a wellness spa and a Georgian-style home that once served as Herbert Hoover’s summer White House, was an unlikely setting for a conference about solving world poverty. But here, in the spring of 2018, representatives from the Rockefeller Foundation, Morgan Stanley and Apollo Global Management gathered to talk about climate change and inequality.
During one session of the Global Impact Investing Network annual meeting, former JPMorgan Chase & Co. investment banker Desiree Fixler proposed using Wall Street financial engineering to benefit some of the world’s poorest. A structured-credit specialist, Fixler described a plan to attract institutional investments by pooling microfinance loans into a tradable financial product. It would provide the poor with resources to help themselves, she said, while delivering investors a reasonable return. Fixler’s idea was so well-received she was invited to discuss it with a top official of the US Overseas Private Investment Corp., a government agency known as OPIC whose mission was doling out taxpayer funds to encourage development.