Got $10? Then you too can be a venture capitalist

Internet users are crowding together to make loans and invest. Should financiers worry?

Crowdfunding, inspired by crowdsourcing, describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowdfunding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns.

Social enterprise has a soulmate in Web 2.0, a powerful new tool for bottom-up, collaborative innovation.

On the online auction giant's new MicroPlace site, investors can lend as little as $50 to would-be small business owners around the globe.

"Demand to invest at Kiva has been so strong, in fact, that after a September appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, the site temporarily ran out of people to help."

"On average, it takes one day for businesses to get funded, and new entreprenuers are listed every day."

Make a loan to an entrepreneur in the developing world for as little as $25. Kiva is the world's first online lending platform connecting online lenders to entrepreneurs across the globe.

Request a loan for up to $25,000 and set the interest rate you're willing to pay! Get a personal loan through Prosper.com - the Online P2P lending marketplace

Zopa is a lending and borrowing exchange where real people sidestep the banks to get a better deal. Borrowers get a great rate and flexible terms, lenders get a great return and can control who their money is lent to. There's no crunch here!

Not only did the subprime meltdown almost send our financial system into cardiac arrest, but it also happened to show that racism is alive and doing just fine.

This paper studies peer-to-peer (p2p) lending on the Internet. Prosper.com, the first p2p lending website in the US, matches individual lenders and borrowers for unsecured consumer loans. Using transaction data from June 1, 2006 to July 31, 2008, we examine what information problems exist on Prosper and whether social networks help alleviate the information problems. As we expect, data identifies three information problems on Prosper.com. First, Prosper lenders face extra adverse selection because they observe categories of credit grades rather than the actual credit scores. This selection is partially offset when Prosper posts more detailed credit information on the website. Second, many Prosper lenders have made mistakes in loan selection but they learn vigorously over time. Third, as Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) predict, a higher interest rate can imply lower rate of return because higher interest attracts lower quality borrowers. Micro-finance theories argue that social networks may identify good risks either because friends and colleagues observe the intrinsic type of borrowers ex ante or because the monitoring within social networks provides a stronger incentive to pay off loans ex post.

As traditional sources such as banks and government agencies pull back, peer-to-peer lending is entering the student loan market.

- Új, közösségi hitelezéssel foglalkozó szájtot indít az iWiW egyik alapítója. Az oldal összekapcsolja azokat, akik kölcsönadnának azokkal, akiknek hitelre van szükségük. Hitelek a bankok háta mögött.

Egyelőre nulla százalékos kamatozású hitellel indul el jövőre az a barátikölcsön-modell, amelybe az egyik Iwiw-alapító, Petrovics Péter, illetve a volt bankár, Szabó Károly tették be pénzüket. Interjú a Noba.hu alapítóival, akik szerint rendszerüknek az elmaradott térségekben dolgozó civil szervezetek hasznát vennék.

Baráti kölcsönök méltányos feltételekkel - noba.hu közösségi, baráti kölcsön