Audible.com just released a new show on Bernie Madoff (Ponzi Supernova, available for free to subscribers) that explains how the world’s biggest financial scam was enabled by banks and hedge funds who were making so much money that they chose to ignore obvious red flags.
Which sounds a lot like today’s China, Inc. Here, for instance, is a sequence of events involving China Huishan Dairy Holdings, an apparently too-big-to-fail chain of dairy farms:
March 21. Huishan Dairy misses payments on some of its loans. The wife of the chairman and largest shareholder (herself an executive in charge of relationships with the company’s bankers) goes missing.
March 23. The local provincial government holds a meeting with the company and its creditor banks to propose a plan to inject liquidity into the company. This is not announced publicly.
March 24. Huishan’s shares plunge 85% in an hour, wiping out more than $4 billion of market value and leading to an indefinite trading halt.
March 28. Huishan admits to missing loan payments and misplacing the Chairman’s wife, but denies reports of faked invoices and misappropriation of funds. The local government, it promises, will buy some of the company’s excess land to bolster its balance sheet and the Chairman will sell some of his shares and invest the proceeds in the company.
This post was published at DollarCollapse on APRIL 14, 2017.
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