July 9, 2012 | Housing Works Bookstore Café
Housing Works Bookstore Café
At 7 pm
126 Crosby Street, New York NY
Conversation with David Roodman, moderated by WSJ columnist Simon Constable. Reception to follow.
Corrections to book:
The book is extremely rigorously researched, heavily annotated with end-notes for the reader to verify individual claims. All sources are publicly available, or are authorised documents, and are reproduced on the website in their original language. However, since the submission of the final draft a number of developments have taken place, and I will attempt to summarise these periodically.
Also, as readers provide feedback, a few errors have also been detected. These will be corrected in the second edition. Alas they were discovered after the book went to press. In the spirit of overall transparency these will be listed here.
House of Representatives
On page 166 I state “These were industry experts speaking under oath.....” This is incorrect; they were not formally under oath. This makes little material difference to the testimonies. In the event that a testimony was false, it would be less serious, legally, if such a statement was made when not under oath. However, the truthfulness of the statement remains unchanged regarding whether it was made under oath or not.
Calvert knowledge of interest rates
On page 116 I state “In the discussion of interest rates the word “flat” had been removed”. In fact the word flat did appear once in the document, on page 13 under the heading Operating Performance. In the section entitled Loan Products and Methodology (entire page 10), all loan details are listed (interest rates, some fees, loan sizes etc. but note, no mention of forced savings here), but the word “flat” is entirely absent. This section is followed by a detailed description of each loan product, again without mention of the word “flat”. In the original ASN Novib document the word “flat” is mentioned three times and in the sections one would anticipate: Products and Credit Products. APRs are not stated in either document. Had an APR been presented to Calvert it would likely have been substantially over their ceiling interest rate stated as 60%, and confirmed by various rating reports. It is also worth pointing out that I do not perform a single interest rate calculation in the entire book, but refer to rating reports and other independent sources, clearly identified in the footnotes.
Mis-spelling of Muhammad Yunus
Muhammad Yunus’s name is correctly spelt in the text and chapter title (12), but alas the head for chapter 12, for all odd page numbers from page 195 to 213, is mis-spelt as “Yunis”.
I apologize for all such oversights, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions.