The China Hustle
The China Hustle
R | 30 March 2018 (USA)
The China Hustle Trailers

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.

Reviews
Wordiezett So much average
Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.
Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
londonmapper 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 :)
Ganbat 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.
BasicLogic People would tell you if you want make money, you've got to use it to make it. But what we saw in these non-violence robberies committed by fake Chinese IPO companies pitching by American investment brokers to the American public, especially those with retirement funds pensioners or those without pension plans, losing their entire savings were just a no-brainer outcome. There are millions Chinese losing their savings to their cheated investments, lot of them committed suicides since they didn't have a penny left. I don't think the 1.3 billion Chinese all knew it, otherwise there wouldn't be so many losers protesting almost daily in China for their failed investments. So this "Crying Wolf" documentary is just like playing music to the deaf public.Investing on the stock market is like playing fire, sooner or later you'll be burned, same as playing the knife, die by the knife. We never heard people who have made lot of money in stock market complaining or whining, only those who lost money. You have to deal with the consequence.
lor_ 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.