The China Hustle Movie Script

Again, a fairly easy to understand and analyze business the opposite of an American software company.

Carson and a friend went to check out the factory, but right away, something seemed off.

It was a country road.

It was in poor shape.

That road could not support the massive trucks that would be going in and out of that facility all day.

Then we got into the factory.

It was a complete dump.

Half the machines were broken, weren't working.

Garbage rotting out in the front yard, no signage.

And this is their main manufacturing facility.

There's water everywhere, all right?

This is a company that's a paper company.

The company had just claimed to have clocked in $100 million U.S. in revenue, which was up substantially from the year before.

How was this growing 50 percent a year?

On the balance sheet, they were showing about... $5 million in raw materials.

And so they had heaps and heaps of this old corrugated cardboard out front.

My friend climbed one of those heaps to take a look at the expanse of rotting cardboard, and when he came down, he said, "If this is worth $5 million, the world's a much richer place than I knew." Carson and his dad looked at each other at that point ah, and said, "There's probably something to do in this stock, but it has nothing to do with owning it." This business was a complete sham.

This is going to zero.

It's a total fraud.

I've never seen anything like this.

Carson wrote a report of his findings and announced that he was going to back his claims by making a bet in the market that the stock would collapse.

It would change the course of his life, but more importantly, it was the first time anyone had poked a hole in the Chinese miracle.

I sent it out into the ether in late June of 2010.

I stayed up for a little bit to watch it close, and going into the close, it just moved down a little bit.

And so as I went to sleep, I wondered whether that was a reaction to the report.