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The broadening of access to financial capital otherwise known as financial capital democratisation (FCD), has been receiving increasingly more attention, especially from those who are concerned about poverty, community development and development of entire nations. This concept has also its roots in ethical and religious based economic systems. In this paper we review various FCD systems. Our main conclusions are that the current crisis is due to severe adverse selection and moral hazard problems, that a new theory calling for acquisition of financial capital with the future earnings of capital sounds promising, the impact of the CRA in the USA is mostly negative, first-time home buyer grants as well as ESOPs and stock options in the work place have achieved some success and that micro financing is good for individual small-scale entrepreneurs but not sufficient for the alleviation of poverty in a developing nation. The paper also explores Islamic financing concepts and analyses its roots in FCD application, given wider interest generated for such financing techniques during the recent market upheavals when Islamic financial institutions seemed less affected by the crisis.

Although principles underlying binary economics were first published in 1958 (Kelso and Adler), the many books and papers that discuss the subject, with the exception of Kane (2000) and Kurland (2001), do not utilize conventional economics language. To facilitate the teaching of binary economics in beginning and intermediate college courses in economics and business, the paper explains some major microeconomic and macroeconomic fundamentals of binary economics by utilizing conventional neo-classical economic models. It then compares the theoretical results reached in a non-binary economic environment to those that may be reached in a binary one. The most important result from the comparison is that, in a non-binary environment, the economy would employ less than full potential capital and thus generate less than optimum output, consumption, saving and investment. The authors hope the article will help the reader to (a) understand the binary principles and (b) analyze the 'binary promise' of greater growth based on a broader distribution of capital ownership.Conventional wisdom effectively treats capital (land, structures, machines, and the like) as though it were a kind of holy water that, sprinkled on or about labor, makes it more productive. Thus, if you have a thousand people working in a factory and you increase the design and power of the machinery so that one hundred men can now do what a thousand did before, conventional wisdom says, 'Voila! The productivity of the labor has gone up 900 percent!' I say 'hogwash.' All you've done is wipe out 90 percent of the jobs, and even the remaining ten percent are probably sitting around pushing buttons. What the economy needs is a way of legitimately getting capital ownership into the hands of the people who now don't have it." (Louis O. Kelso, 1982, www.kelsoinstitute.com)

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