Hacker Cinema
The China Hustle
2018 · Film · documentary · 84 min
Directed by Jed Rothstein
An unsettling and eye-opening Wall Street horror story about Chinese companies, the American stock market, and the opportunistic greed behind the biggest heist you've never heard of.
11 positive6 neutralfrom 17 commenters
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From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
19 comments on Hacker News
> Do you really trust China to manage the World's currency?
No, they have terminal credibility issues when it comes to how they handle things, and its real hard to support something like that when you have no laws protecting foreign investors.
Netflix's The China Hustle was a great documentary providing visibility on these issues. A world currency is a foreign investment in any country that accepts and denominates in that currency.
Check out The China Hustle for a great documentary on this topic: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_china_hustle
It's currently streaming on Hulu and Amazon Prime Video.
There's a documentary[0], titled "The China Hustle", that goes into reverse takeovers (RTOs, reverse mergers, reverse IPOs) that went on after the 2008 financial crisis.
- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Hustle
Except, the problem, is that the China Hustle displayed AliBaba in a bad shape and I doubt the guys were short the NYSE:BABA stock. The film was slightly hinting that you should be shorting or offloading your BABA stock.
But what happened since? The film was released in 2017 (BABA around ~90) and now the stock is trading around ~195.
So if you offloaded your stock, you'll have lost on some nice gains. It's worse if you have shorted: It'd have been a real hustle and it's not clear when the stock will correct.
The China Hustle[1] is a great documentary about the systemic securities fraud committed by Chinese companies selling into the American markets in a way that allows them to avoid much of the disclosure and due diligence typically required. It follows investors from the Muddy Waters firm mentioned in the this article and was made by the same group who did documentary version of The Smartest Guys in the Room.
I believe the film is currently streaming on Hulu.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Hustle
No direct experience with this, but I just watched “The China Hustle” on a plane flight recently:
https://www.thechinahustlefilm.com/
During the 2010’s several hundred Chinese companies were listed on US exchanges, and it was discovered later by intrepid investors that many had materially misrepresented their operations, financials, etc and were little more than run-down plants from China’s full-communist past. The film goes into more detail and visits several to show what they really are.
i would recommend the documentary "the china hustle"
i was skeptical of the documentary before watching, but it is very good
Seems like it's not available in the US: https://netflixable.com/uk/en-US/movie/the-china-hustle-2017
Accessing from the US, I get an error as well.
This Netflix link seems to work though: https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-China-Hustle/80221646
Or on Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_china_hustle
> Lately it seems the Chinese government practically encourages companies to commit securities fraud in the US so I can’t imagine they’d be much help either.
The China Hustle is a good movie if anyone wants to see how these schemes work.
I agree, as long as he's not putting directly money into it respectively making debts to sustain it - even if this fails he will assimilate a lot of know-how in a lot of different areas (all kinds of soft-skills plus tech-skills plus mgmt skills from organizational to accounting, etc...) that he can use a lot later on.
One one hand "Chinese cryptocurrency" might be ok but in general the chinese range covers everything from "excellent" (e.g. Huawei & Geely are a great company respectively holding) to "scam" ( e.g. what shown in the funny&interesting doc "the china hustle" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7215388/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1 )
Focusing on "Chinese cryptocurrency", if that cryptocurrency is meant to be used (as well) within China then it might have a strong starting position (from what I remember the government prohibited bitcoins & Co therefore if this one is admitted it will have a huuuge market) but on the other hand you're right thinking (I'm interpreting this) that even if it's #1 in China and absolutely flawless from a tech-point-of-view, other countries/people/organizations might still not adopt it for fear of the potentially tech-unknown => you might ask him / set friendly challenges about these and other points to see if he's covered all different angles assuming a successful implementation... .
Cheers :)
Obligatory reference to The China Hustle, a documentary that won awards for putting the spotlight on this fraud being perpetrated at scale.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/movies/the-china-hustle-review.html
Thanks!!
- Betting on Zero (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3762912/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1):
Ha, I can't believe that Herbalife not only still exists but that if I look at its share price it even flourished, got into sponsoring, etc... - I know about the company because looong time back it did a push as well here in Switzerland, but as at that time I tagged it as "scam" I supposed that it would soon or later disappear... . Very interesting to be reminded about how "multi-level marketing"/"pyramid selling" works and very nice that by showing what that Ackman guy did I now understand as well e.g. all these recent discussions related to "short sellers" vs Tesla (I wasn't fully aware that "short selling" could be done in such an active way - I thought that some regulator would start targeting you...).
- The China Hustle (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7215388/?ref_=nv_sr_1)
Very interesting. I never heard about "reverse merges". Additionally I tended to think that e.g. the SEC and/or other regulators not only establish rules and react when they're not followed but actively check the truthfulness of the statements/informations beforehand, but it does not seem to be working that way (I can understand the reasons, but on the other hand this kind of defeats the reason of having such rules...). Btw a few weeks ago I stumbled upon some videos of this guy (e.g. "Why I refuse to buy property in China" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lAoTBVTTO8 ), which explain a bit how chinese people think and some of them are related to what is mentioned briefly in the documentary about the chinese housing bubble.
- Dirty Money (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7889220/?ref_=nv_sr_1): pending... .
A few favorites that come to mind.
- Betting on Zero. A documentary on the billion dollar short on Herbalife and whether or not Herbalife is a pyramid scheme. It is definitely biased towards making Bill Ackman look good (the guy who made it is friends with Ackman) but nonetheless is very interesting and if you are anti-MLM it will fit your view.
- Dirty Money. I wouldn't say it is straight finance but shows a variety of business stories that are very interesting. I thought the one on the payday loan guy was the most interesting. It is produced by Alex Gibney (who did the Enron doc) so if you liked that one then this will be up your alley too.
- The China Hustle. Highlights some difficult in investing in Chinese companies and how they differ in terms of standards and reporting.
This is a surprisingly common way for Chinese companies to get listed in overseas stock markets. Netflix has a good documentary about the practice called "The China Hustle"
And much vigilance is required too. Timing of the documentary "The China Hustle" couldn't be more perfect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55892jT06aI
> Tencent Holdings Ltd., with nearly 1 billion users, reported that its net income almost doubled in the last quarter, to $3.3 billion. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., which dominates online retail, is expecting growth of 55 percent this year. Investors may worry about Chinese debt, but they're giddy about Chinese tech.
Anyone knows the SEC equivalent site for pulling revenue numbers for Chinese companies? If possible, direct links for Tencent and Alibaba will be even more helpful.
The reason I am asking is Alibaba has been investigated for their creative accounting:
https://www.thestreet.com/story/14277425/1/alibaba-still-cooperating-with-sec-probe-as-it-forecasts-45-to-49-sales-growth.html
And, I recently watched "The China Hustle" documentary. Discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16726355
One of the highlights in the documentary was the financial reporting. There was a huge gap between revenues western Media and US markets was seeing vs what was being reported in China. The whole idea being accessing financial data for Chinese companies was hard.
everyone already forgot the top story here on HN a few weeks ago?
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/finance-documentary-the-china-hustle-revisits-chinese-reverse-mergers-and-activist-short-sellers-2018-03-30
There was documentary posted here yesterday, The China Hustle. It showed Chinese companies showing fake transactions to boost revenue numbers. This could be that kind of scam, hire lots of people to show growth.