The China Hustle

Jed Rothstein does a bang-up job in bringing to cinematic life a recent but underreported massive fraud perpetrated on U.S. stock investors by unscrupulous Chinese companies and equally shady American brokers, auditors and lawyers. It is a timely documentary in this era where Republican domination of the federal government, and there absurd anti-regulation crusade merely encourage more such fleecing of the public.

Principal whistleblower here is a Pennsylvanian by way of Flint, Michigan (famed as the home of veteran movie muckraker Michael Moore) named Dan David, who declares at the outset of the show that there are no good guys depicted, himself included. He headed up an investment firm that helped push several new Chinese companies on the Big Board, only later to discover that their profits and vast growth were fictional.

The gimmick started with Reverse Mergers, whereby a company would merge into an SEC registered company of old that was inactive, say a 19th Century mining corporation. That trick circumvented the due diligence necessary for a new company to gain a stock listing, and creepy folks here in the U.S. took it from there.

Location footage shot secretly in China show how phony the supposdly booming companies actually were, and interviewees take us through the potentially dry financial machinations that come alive under Jed's direction. Dramatic highpoint occurs when former presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark walks off the set during his interview, rightfully realizing it will put him in a bad light as ex-CEO of one of the misbehaving investment banks.

Ultimately I suspect the ongoing wave of Republican party and right-wing propaganda will overwhelm this film or any other's message, in favor of advancing the shibboleths that ending government supervision (read: "interference") with the free market will solve all ills. Just as Trump so easily gets away (so far) with every outlandish denial or contradiction of the truth on a daily basis, such eye-opening exercises as this fact-filled documentary require a public willing to listen, something currently not in the cards.

Great story potential but the direction of the documentary ran off into weird areas and kind of lost the plot. Also, the attempt to simplify the story so a 10 year old could understand it meant everything took a very long time to explain. I'm a stockmarket fanatic but I couldn't finish this one. Really disappointing as I was interested in the methods being used to monitor the Chinese companies and all I got was CCTV footage showing a lack of trucks - kind of understandable though considering that monitoring private companies in China is a jailable offence. I wanted more than just claims that capitalism is a flawed system and that Americans can be greedy, I knew all that before watching.

An excellent movie to watch. While the film does make some ridiculous generalisations ("there is no rule of law in China"), it is extremely revealing how nondescript Chinese companies that Chinese investors would not have touched with a barge pole were sold as "the next hot thing" to unsuspecting US based investors.

Of course, they could have done some homework and only invested in the 210 massive stable Chinese companies that are listed in the Hong Kong stock exchange or the 40 largest private companies like BYD listed in HKEx, greed seems to have got the better of them. In that case, retired people are no different from wall street bankers, except that the former tend to lose all they have while the latter get richer with 1 in 100 going to jail for seven years.

The documentary features excellent interviews with the wayer who represented these firms Mitchell Nussbaum, whistleblower Dan David (who is likable but at times emerges looking like a wannabe Michael Blurry from The Big Short) and Retd. general Wesley Clark who spoke at many of "investment seminars" held from 2008 to 2016 by the lead firm that sold those c#@ppy stocks and is the focus of the film (Roth Capital).

An excellent useful use of 2 hours of your life :)

I have been living here in China almost 2 decades and i know for a fact that some so called Chinese companies estimated growth and user base numbers are highly exaggerated and fake, it sickness me from time to time.

This is about yet another financial scandal. It's a perfect follow-up to The Big Short. After the crash of 2008-2009, some clever guys, both Chinese and American, worked out another way to scam the markets. Some smaller banks, especially Roth Capital, which threw lavish conferences featuring entertainment by the likes of Billy Idol and Snoop Dogg, and Rodman and Renshaw, captained by the former Democratic presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark, pushed reverse mergers.

You've never heard of reverse mergers? Chinese companies could not be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, so they "merged" with defunct American companies which had previously been listed, and presto change-o, now Chinese companies were on the exchange. There was no penalty for making outrageous claims about the assets of their businesses, and many Americans were only too eager to buy into this new opportunity. Neither the SEC nor Congress was concerned about the fraud involved. The "heroes" of our movie investigated some of these companies in China, a dangerous matter, published their research, and shorted the companies' stock, betting that the value of their stock would fall when the truth was revealed.

The China Hustle does a good job of explaining the financial matters so that the average viewercan understand. Neither the SEC, big law firms like Loeb & Loeb, the big accounting firms, nor Congress come out looking very good in this one.