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More background on Grameen - it sounds like a loan-shark mafiya: Almost three-quarters of poor households have borrowed from Grameen Bank or one of the 700 groups that provide microcredit. The loans, some for as little as $8, are meant to help people with few other options earn an income and break out of poverty. Yunus runs Grameen Bank as managing director and sits on the board of many of the Grameen companies. He says the bank owns no stake in most of them and he personally owns no part of Grameen Bank, from which he draws a monthly salary of 15,000 taka. "They are all started by me and funded separately," says Yunus, seated in his office in the bank's 21-story building in Dhaka, the capital. "You can call it a Professor Yunus empire but not a Grameen Bank empire." Geeta Rani says taking a loan from Grameen Bank made her situation worse. Five years ago, Rani borrowed 2,000 taka. She planned to buy a cow, fatten it and sell it to augment her husband's 4,000 taka annual income as a barber in Kamarpara, a village in the northern district of Nilphamari. When a famine hit, she used some of the funds for rice to feed her three children. With the remaining amount, she bought a goat because she could not afford a cow and lost most of what she spent when the animal became ill. The family cut back on meals to repay Grameen Bank 44 taka each week, Rani says. She says making the repayments left her more distressed than she was before the loan. "I wouldn't borrow from Grameen again," she says.

Greeta Rani won't borrow from Grameen Bank again but the bank had nothing to do with the famine nor the goat's illness. She was still obligated to repay the debt. And, to top it off, she never bought that cow!

People make bad financial decisions all the time, and sometimes banks loan money when they really shouldn't. We're seeing those cases coming home to roost with folks being caught by variable interest, interest-only loans or balloon payments.

I'd be willing to bet a week's pay that:
1. The baby is a girl (no parents would sell a boy).
2. The buyers are brothel owners or will sell
the girl into prostitution in good time.
Johns in South Asia will pay a pretty penny for the
pleasure of deflowering an underage girl.