Not sure if banks were worried about thier financial position why would they increase thier rates, unless like airlines collecting money for flights they had no intention of flying

Doc67 wrote: ↑Thu Jan 07, 2021 1:04 pm It's on a real tear at the moment. Doubled in the last month.

I dearly wish there were a pie chart showing how many of those purchases were speculators expecting the price to keep climbing, how many are buying in order to hide money, how many are buying in order to pay off ransoms, and how many are buying because they want to do their day-to-day shopping with Bitcoin.

Can anyone say PONZI?

Statement
IFC Watchdog Accepts Complaint over Microfinance Abuses in Cambodia
May 3, 2022

The Compliance Advisor Ombudsman of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) has accepted and will move ahead with its review of a complaint alleging human rights violations and violations of IFC performance standards committed by six microfinance institutions and banks that offer microloans in Cambodia.

The complaint was filed on behalf of affected borrowers by Equitable Cambodia (EC) and the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO). It details how the IFC failed in its obligation to conduct due diligence and supervise projects to ensure compliance with performance standards. As a result, grave harms resulted from IFC loans and investments in six microfinance institutions (MFIs) and microloan-providing banks in Cambodia – ACLEDA, Hattha Bank, Sathapana, Amret, LOLC, and Prasac – who together hold about 75% of the country’s microloans.
https://www.licadho-cambodia.org/

My recent experience with Finance companies in Cambodia. Mature female factory worker earning $250 a month, gets a loan of $6,000 from K,Kredit to buy into a multi level marketing scam selling cosmetics, skin whiting products etc. She cannot sell any, so goes to a new Korean Banking / Finance company that is making inroads in Cambodia. Asks for a $10,000 loan to pay off the previous lender. Repayments are $281 per month. This includes $3,000 in interest. .Acting as security for this is her 20 year old daughter, earning $200 per month and 18 year old daughter still going to school, no bank account , no money, no job.

So whats in it for the finance company, ????. Well they hold the title of the house and as no payments are made they can sell the house, probably at a low price, after all they only want their money and interest payments back. The Bank manager probably got his bonus for making the loan.

The loan and finance industry certainly need a big cleanup as there are so many of them it is impossible them all to survive unless they enter into unscrupulous one-sided deals .

I know in our little town of Prey Veng in the last year there has been 5-10 new micro finance banks open up and they are not small buildings they are bigger than ABA and Canada banks in size.
It not a coincidence that many home's are being done up or built and new bikes and cars about.

"Cambodia has the world’s highest average microloan debt per person at $4280 despite a GDP per capita of $1,543 in 2020, according to the World Bank."

https://southeastasiaglobe.com/land-los ... icroloans/

Interesting long read on the negative results of micro-lending, as it is practised in Cambodia:

World Bank-Linked Watchdog to Probe Alleged Cambodian Microfinance Abuses
Two Cambodian civil society groups claim that “reckless” micro-lending has contributed to a brewing rural debt crisis.
By Sebastian Strangio
May 05, 2022
World Bank-Linked Watchdog to Probe Alleged Cambodian Microfinance Abuses

The watchdog of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private lending arm, will review a complaint alleging it has caused “grave harm” by funding microfinance lenders in Cambodia.

The complaint was made by the local advocacy groups LICADHO and Equitable Cambodia (EC), who announced in a joint statement on Tuesday that the IFC’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman had agreed to look into their claims that IFC loans and investments in the country’s ballooning microcredit sector have led to widespread human rights abuses.

The complaint, which the two groups made on behalf of hundreds of thousands of debt-burdened Cambodians, alleges that the IFC has “failed in its obligation to conduct due diligence and supervise projects to ensure compliance with performance standards.”

According to the complaint, the IFC has over the past five years channeled more than $400 million to six lenders in Cambodia – ACLEDA, Hattha Bank, Sathapana, Amret, LOLC and Prasac – that included “direct loans, syndicated loans, equity investments, and loans from IFC-backed funds.” Together, these six institutions hold about 75 percent of Cambodia’s microloans.

Cambodian households now hold nearly 3 million microloans totaling more than $14 billion, according to the statement, which called for “a sector-wide audit of the country’s microloan sector is urgently needed to identify the scope and severity of harms associated with these loans across the country.”

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“The IFC’s reckless investments and lack of due diligence regarding its microfinance projects have destroyed lives and wrecked communities across Cambodia, and they must take steps to offer real relief to these borrowers,” Naly Pilorge, LICADHO’s outreach director said in the joint statement.

For two decades, microfinance has been pushed by foreign donors as a panacea to Cambodia’s rural development challenges. Technocrats and officials in far-off capitals have conjured visions of rural poverty melting away as financially empowered villagers use microcredit loans to invest in local businesses and haul themselves – and the country as a whole – up the ladder to “middle-income” status.

The reality in Cambodia has been very different. As microcredit sector has expanded, debt levels have risen rapidly, burdening hundreds of thousands of mostly rural families with crushing and sometimes insurmountable debt burdens. In a report published in March 2020, the Microfinance Index of Market Outreach and Saturation (MIMOSA) found that Cambodia’s rate of credit saturation was the highest among the 11 countries it studied. More than that, it found that loan sizes in Cambodia had grown rapidly over the years, burdening many borrowers with more debt than they could repay.

By this point, Cambodian NGOs had already been sounding the alarm about microfinance for some time. In an August 2019 report titled “Collateral Damage,” LICADHO and the urban rights NGO Sahmakum Teang Tnaut documented how skyrocketing debt levels had generated a range of human rights abuses, “including coerced land sales, child labor, debt-driven migration, and bonded labor.”

All of the 28 microfinance borrowers interviewed in the report described how their situation worsened after taking a loan from a microfinance institution (MFI). The report found that some Cambodian households had taken out at least on additional loan, either from an informal village moneylender, to repay an existing microfinance loan. It concluded that “MFI loans and informal private loans are used in tandem, forming a cycle that drives clients further into debt.”
Full article: https://thediplomat.com/2022/05/world-b ... ce-abuses/

Tootsfriend wrote: ↑Thu May 05, 2022 7:19 pm My recent experience with Finance companies in Cambodia. Mature female factory worker earning $250 a month, gets a loan of $6,000 from K,Kredit to buy into a multi level marketing scam selling cosmetics, skin whiting products etc. She cannot sell any, so goes to a new Korean Banking / Finance company that is making inroads in Cambodia. Asks for a $10,000 loan to pay off the previous lender. Repayments are $281 per month. This includes $3,000 in interest. .Acting as security for this is her 20 year old daughter, earning $200 per month and 18 year old daughter still going to school, no bank account , no money, no job.

So whats in it for the finance company, ????. Well they hold the title of the house and as no payments are made they can sell the house, probably at a low price, after all they only want their money and interest payments back. The Bank manager probably got his bonus for making the loan.

The loan and finance industry certainly need a big cleanup as there are so many of them it is impossible them all to survive unless they enter into unscrupulous one-sided deals .

That’s shocking. The sort of thing that can result in suicide in western countries.