Free Republic

The winding roads into the valley of Nebaj are lined with advertisements for cheap loans. Banks and cooperatives and microfinance operations make their pitches: “Credit in three days.” “Funding for your small business.” “We’ve lowered our interest rates!” U.S. officials have long touted the power of finance to lift people out of poverty — and backed loans to farmers and small-business owners across the developing world. But here in the Guatemala Highlands, the epicenter of the country’s migrant exodus, those loans often fund a different activity, the region’s most profitable: Smuggling migrants north to the United States. Over the past...

BEIJING (Reuters) - Peter Wang was asleep at his home in Beijing last Monday when police officers arrived before dawn to detain him, saying he had helped organize a protest planned for later that day. Across the city, others who had lost money investing in China’s online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms - including some who had traveled from as far away as Shandong and Shanxi provinces - got similar visits from police. By the time they were released, the demonstration they had planned using social media chat groups had fizzled amid a massive security response around the China Banking and...

Pradyun Chakraborty reclaimed his torn fishing net from the river. He and his wife counted the fish they caught—only 20 small Bagdha Ponnas, enough to get him 20 rupees (40 cents US). The net alone cost him 200 rupees ($5 US) to rent, half of which he still owed to his creditor. With fish escaping from his torn net and hardly any other work, Pradyun and his family were just barely surviving. It was the same for Jalal Balan. He bought his fishing net on credit for 1,000 rupees ($22 US) and was slowly paying it off. The majority of...

The U.S. provides more than $15 billion in aid (not counting substantial aid in Iraq as part of reconstruction) to countries around the world every year. Because of the nature of government, some of it works, but much of it gets sucked up by either the bureaucracies or corruption of both the giving and receiving countries. The World Bank is plagued by the same problems: Kickbacks, payoffs, bribery, embezzlement, and collusive bidding plague bank-funded projects around the world, a U.S. News analysis shows. The scale of the problem is enormous: Knowledgeable analysts believe corrupt practices of one type or another...