The China Hustle Movie Script

The person that's most attracted to short selling is probably those who've been dropped on their heads at birth.

They're iconoclasts.

Do I believe that their motivation was to-- was justice for the world?

No, I think their motivation was to profit from this.

It's about cleaning our financial markets.

It's about stopping a fraud.

What I really want to do is, I want to reach in... Remember this guy, Dick Fuld?

He ran Lehman Brothers, the bank whose collapse set off the financial crisis in 2008.

He's got an opinion about short sellers.

Rip out their heart, and eat it before they die.

So there are a lot of problems here.

There are a lot of problems here.

When I bet against a company, it's because I believe that they're misrepresenting.

And their trend line doesn't matter to me at all.

I am somebody that will bet against fraud.

As Dan and Carson began looking for other Chinese companies to short, Matt was just getting back from his safari.

He'd been out of the loop and wanted to make sense of what he'd been a part of.

So he asked his friend Soren, a finance industry lawyer from New York, to meet him for a weekend in the mountains and take a look at some of the documents he'd saved from his time at Roth.

In the process, they would discover a new way to look at the whole landscape of fraud.

Matt said, "Just look at these companies.

Tell me what you think." L&L Energy was nominally a coal company.

Very typical of an RTO fraud in that its financial performance was simply too good to be true.

(man speaking Mandarin) The notion that a small reverse merger from rural China could somehow efficiently mine and process coal so much better than the best coal companies in the world was just not credible.

Digging into the papers, they uncovered a new way to understand what was really going on with the hundreds of Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges.

What we came back with were what are called SAIC filings.