It's a total lie, as past life karma isn't about punishment and has nothing to do with morality or good and bad, but actual cause and effect.
People are born poor and/or having trouble attracting money because they took an oath of poverty in one of their past lives. That's just one of the reason, it could be other causes. Negative karma is mostly about things you did to yourself or your own reaction to what others did to you, not something that you did to others that you're punished for in this life. Another example is when people have certain phobias, like someone having an unreasonable fear of water because he/she died by drowning in a previous life. Or when someone has a chronic neck pain because someone shoot an arrow to his neck and killed him in his previous life. Or when someone fears/hates a person for no apparent reason, it could be that the other person did something bad to him/her in one of their past lives. You get the point.
There's also positive karma, for example like being born as a natural psychic because you developed your psychic abilities in past lives.
As your question about why people suffer, people have given you many answers before, because you've asked about it more than once.
