m****s
发帖数: 7397 | 1 Did Michael Lewis libel Wing Chau?
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/02/28/did-michael-le
Felix Salmon
A slice of lime in the soda
Feb 28, 2011 22:45 EST
Is this a case of reality copying satire? A couple of weeks ago, Michael
Lewis caricatured the dissenters from the FCIC report:
Financial Crisis Cause No. 3: The Chinese
And then today, in his defamation lawsuit against Lewis, Wing Chau seems to
imply that’s what Lewis actually thinks:
Wing Chau and his immediate family are Chinese immigrants. His father, Muk
Loong Chau, fled Chairman Mao’s China in 1953 to make a better life for his
family in America—to pursue the American dream. Mr. Chau was born in Hong
Kong, where the family was waylaid for many year while awaiting a visa.
Eventually, the family immigrated to Rhode Island, where his father took
various jobs at Chinese restaurants, usually working six days per week.
Why is this in the lawsuit? As Nitasha Tiku notes, it has nothing to do with
the case, and can only be there to make Lewis seem prejudiced against the
Chinese.
Meanwhile, there’s all manner of wonderful stuff in the suit designed to
make us prejudiced against Lewis:
I’m particularly fond of the BA in Art History (I have one myself) and the
“family compound” (sadly not).
There’s lots more where that came from in the suit, which is particularly
adept at using information from Lewis’s book to cast aspersions on its
central character and, ultimately, on the book itself.
All of which is enough to make you want to dismiss the lawsuit as a very
silly and opportunistic, if it weren’t for the fact that hidden on pages 15
-18 of the 37-page complaint seems to be a pretty colorable case against
Lewis and his publisher. (Steve Eisman is also a defendant, which I’m not
so sure about.)
Wing Chau certainly comes off very badly in the book — in my own review, I
said that Lewis “sets up a hapless fund manager named Wing Chau as a major
villain”. It’s very easy to see that the reputational damage he says that
he suffered as a result of the book’s publication is real. So the next
question is: does the book portray him accurately? Or does it stray into
defamatory fiction?
The book states that Chau “controlled roughly $15 billion, invested in
nothing but CDOs backed by the triple-B tranche of a mortgage bond”, and
told Eisman all manner of things about himself which few fund managers would
ever admit to a perfect stranger, even if they were true. Chau says that he
was invested in A-rated bonds as well as corporate and other non-mortgage
debt; I believe him, although the complaint never quantifies what proportion
of Chau’s CDOs were anything but BBB-rated mortgages. I can also believe
that some of what Eisman says that Chau said was made up — although
Bloomberg did find a second source confirming that Chau thanked Eisman for
shorting the market, thereby providing more raw material, in the form of
credit default swaps, for him to write.
I’ve suspected since March 1 of last year that although The Big Short is a
spectacular book and a superlative piece of narrative financial journalism,
Lewis was all too willing to simply accept whatever he was told by Eisman
without checking his facts particularly assiduously. In the grand scheme of
things, that doesn’t matter. The specifics of the allegations about Goldman
Sachs and Wing Chau might not be spot-on, but the bigger picture is. Lewis
’s readers weren’t misled about the financial crisis in general, or Eisman
’s story.
But if Wing Chau can persuade a jury that specific factual allegations
against him caused him significant damages, this could be a hard case for
Lewis to win.
Lewis’s best defense, I suspect, will be that the fall-off in Chau’s
business was inevitable, after the crisis broke, and that his dismal
performance as one of the largest managers of subprime CDOs would have left
him with precious little “reputation in the business community” either way
. It’s entirely possible that Chau’s friends, being nice to him, have told
him that he’s not the reason no one wants to invest with him, it’s the
book. But there’s a good chance that they’d come up with some other excuse
had Lewis not written The Big Short.
I suspect this case won’t ever go to jury: Chau doesn’t want to go through
discovery, and no one wants to spend enormous sums of money on lawyers. So
maybe a well-crafted complaint could get some kind of a payout for Chau
quite quickly. But if he wants to fight this case all the way, he end up
subjected to some highly embarrassing cross-examination. | Y*****2
发帖数: 38613 | 2 interesting...
any sort of misrepresentation of anyone in published books is not good...
books stay forever. | a*o
发帖数: 25262 | 3 good book? His Liar's Poker was fun to read. | m****s
发帖数: 7397 | 4 ML 这头猪 确实老挑中国人民。
把它阉了
【在 a*o 的大作中提到】
: good book? His Liar's Poker was fun to read.
| a*o
发帖数: 25262 | 5 sp
Financial Crisis Cause No. 3: The Chinese
What the heck is this?
【在 m****s 的大作中提到】
: ML 这头猪 确实老挑中国人民。
: 把它阉了
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