A documentary by Josh Rothstein. In English and Mandarin, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Although China is the key word here, most of the hustling described in this brisk, 80-minute doc is being done by Americans. With its cool graphics and satellite-eye view of global chicanery, this is an easy sit for people who enjoyed the comic fictionalizing of The Big Short.

Produced by Alex Gibney, Mark Cuban, and others, The China Hustle was directed by doc veteran Josh Rothstein, guided by the circuitous adventures of investment gadfly Dan David, who wrote a book of the same name. The goateed, bearlike David first smelled a hustle after 2008’s massive financial collapse, which left investors scrambling. He found it bizarrely easy to “short” companies with Chinese connections—that is, to guess when stocks were hugely overvalued and to trade them before they sank.

Another investor, Carson Block, noticed how many “reverse mergers” were happening, with dubious Chinese companies getting attached to American outfits virtually dead but still listed on U.S. stock exchanges. He became particularly suspicious of a company called Orient Paper that claimed assets of at least $15 million. Unlike his colleagues, Block actually went to the plant in China and found a decrepit enterprise with a few rusty machines and piles of mouldy cardboard—an apt metaphor for the whole enterprise.

Propping up cardboard on this side of the water are respectable-seeming Wall Street ratings outfits like Rodman & Renshaw, whose former figurehead, retired general Wesley Clark, appears here and then walks out when he realizes there’s no good way to spin what these companies do. Because there is zero oversight over such capitalist ventures in China—“the Wild West”, as one investor calls it—American counterparts simply accept whatever paperwork they’re handed, and the ratings giants rubber-stamp them, taking a cut from every transaction.

There is no incentive to investigate further, and same goes for the Federal Trade Commission, in Washington, D.C. Hustle follows David there, to a congressional hearing in which only Elizabeth Warren—surprise!—shows any interest in the reverse-merger scam. Even talking heads critical of the movie’s muckraking stance admit that this boondoggle is now entangling banks and small investors across North America. Since the movie was finished, by the way, Trump has appointed a new head of the FTC: the lawyer who handled the IPO for the biggest bubble of all, Alibaba. Don’t say you weren’t warned.