In a sad irony, Chilean bureaucrats are trying to shut down a low-interest lending market set up by the founder of Start-Up Chile.
The British firm is using some of the investment to buy Endurance Lending Network, a smaller American small-business lending network set up last year, to expand into the United States market.
Its website owes something to the online auction house eBay, and to Zopa, a person-to-person lending platform set up in 2005.
Last month, the Guardian exposed a $2.7bn£1.9bnbn) lending structure set up in the Netherlands by drugs group AstraZeneca to avoid UK tax.
As proposed, the fee would apply to financial institutions with more than $50 billion in assets and that were eligible for an array of emerging assistance programs, including the TARP and lending programs set up by the F.D.I.C. and the Federal Reserve.
The actions Friday involved two lending facilities set up recently by the Fed to meet the needs of banks, investment banks and other financial institutions hit by the credit crisis after a series of disclosures about the shakiness of their packages of subprime mortgages.
"How, for example, will the funding for the lending scheme be set up and monitored so that it does in fact deliver money to the real economy?
Mr. Bernanke said the Fed should retain the ability, in an emergency, to create the sort of extraordinary lending programs it set up in 2008 to ease liquidity for investment banks and prop up markets for commercial paper, money market funds and consumer, auto and student loans.
But with the programme also came a rise in informal savings and lending groups, where cash transfer beneficiaries, used their steady income as a guarantor to join a local savings and lending group to set up an income generating activity.
One sector that Endurance is targeting in the United States is lending to entrepreneurs who set up restaurant franchises.
