Who Needs Financing More Than Businesses? Refugees

Wall Streeters will happily expound upon the many uses of finance: to ensure the safety of assets and belongings, to solve timing problems between the outflow and inflow of capital, to allocate risks to parties that can best handle them and to channel resources to productive uses. What they may not have considered is who needs all those services more than anyone -- the world’s 70 million refugees and internally displaced people.

That shocking number is the highest since World War II. What’s worse, people are being displaced for ever-longer periods of time: The average refugee today won’t break out of that status for over a decade. And, contrary to public perception in wealthy countries, developing nations host 90% of the global refugee population. Those countries are especially ill-prepared for the burden, given that they’re already struggling to meet the needs of their own citizens.