Never Enough by Joe McGinniss Read Free Book Online Page A

expiration of the ninety-nine-year lease that had made the territory a British colony since the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, England ceded control of Hong Kong to China. The event had been anticipated, debated, longed for, dreaded, and obsessed over since 1984, when the British and Chinese had agreed on the change in sovereignty. The handover was accompanied by an emotional elegy from Chris Patten, the last British governor of the colony, a few stilted words from Prince Charles, and the most spectacular fireworks display of the twentieth century.
    At the stroke of midnight, the Scots Guards band played “God Save the Queen” for the last time on Hong Kong soil and the Union Jack was lowered to make way for the Chinese flag. For millions of Chinese and British citizens, not only in Hong Kong but around the world, the peaceful transition was a historic event of vast significance that they would remember for the rest of their lives.
    But investment bankers view the world through a different lens, one shaped by the prism of profit. For Rob, the change in sovereignty was not the big news. The big news came two days later when the government of Thailand allowed the baht to float freely in currency markets. It sank like a stone, triggering one of the most sudden and dire economic collapses in the history of modern Asia. The Asian currency crisis of 1997–98 (also known as the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, the East Asian financial crisis, the Asian economic crisis of 1997, the East Asian economic collapse, et cetera) had begun.

7. MOMMY DEAREST
    BOOKS HAVE BEEN WRITTEN, CONFERENCES HAVE BEEN convened, and opposing analyses have clashed like swords as researchers and theorists have sought to explain the East Asian crisis: what caused it, what exacerbated it, what finally brought it under control. Rob spent scant time pondering the abstractions. What he wanted to know was which companies among the dozens suddenly going belly-up could be resuscitated (and later controlled) by Goldman Sachs.
    The crisis started in Thailand in late June when the government announced it was removing the props from under one of the country’s largest financial services companies, Finance One. This meant that creditors would face losses from which the government had previously protected them. Foreign money was sucked out of the country overnight. The government had no choice but to try to float the baht. Within days, a pandemic of what New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman called “bahtulism” swept across East Asia.
    The Malaysian ringgit, the Indonesian rupiah, and the Philippine peso fell in tandem with the baht. Multinational banks yanked massive sums from the region as fast as their cursors could fly across their screens. There was no precedent for the crisis that ensued. Over the next twelve months the U.S. dollar value of most East Asian currencies fell by more than 50 percent and most regional stock market indices lost more than half their value.
    Not in his wildest dreams could Rob Kissel have envisioned such a delightful scenario to greet him upon his arrival in Hong Kong. Cries of corporate anguish were music to his ears. The greater the pain, the greater his gain.
    By the time of the ’97 collapse Rob had been a distressed-debt specialist for almost ten years. He’d learned to consider the field’s perverse mind-set not only rational but morally palatable, much as a military commander could speak of an “acceptable” number of casualties. Rob’s Hong Kong was one very long branch on which hundreds of vultures perched. They pushed and pulled and elbowed one another as they jostled for the best position from which to view the fresh carcasses below. When one flapped its wings to begin a descent, dozens followed. And there was no shortage of carrion to pick over. For a distressed-debt specialist based in Hong Kong, the East Asian financial crisis was the opportunity of a lifetime. Suddenly, there