Bank on few being immune to greed
By Ni Tao |
May 12, 2013, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
ACCORDING to an old joke, if a falling object hits and kills 10 people on Wall Street, chances are that nine out of them are lawyers or bankers.
This concentration of financial professionals in a densely populated place is also likely to be matched in Hong Kong's Central area, one of Asia's best-known financial clusters, teeming with investment bankers, fund managers and securities brokers.
So what would happen if something falls off a glitzy, towering office building in Central and kills someone as prominent as Jason Donahue?
Donahue is a figure central to Phillip Y. Kim's financial thriller "Nothing Gained." As the chief of the Asian operations of Barker Reed, a fictitious leading investment bank, he drowns while taking a nighttime swim with friends and colleagues.
His death drops a bombshell, sending shockwaves around the regional market and leaving his heartbroken family, mistress, company colleagues and business partners with hard questions to answer.
The timing of Donahue's death could hardly have been worse. It coincides with the 2008 world financial crisis and the start of the European debt debacle - two events that bring turmoil to the privileged lives of managers like Donahue. But his mess is even bigger, as he got himself into a shady deal concerning a casino project in Macau without his company's knowledge.
The deal went wrong and threatened to unravel after Donahue pocketed US$20 million as his personal fees out of the investors' US$120 payment. He justified this as "payback" for lobbying to get the go-ahead from authorities for the project.
But this "theft" deeply annoys the investor, a thuggish Vegas property contractor.
Donahue's sudden and suspicious death prompts the developer and his minions to mercilessly harass the banker's Korean-American widow into paying her husband's debts.
The story would be, of course, a little too simplistic if it merely revolved around the unethical deeds of a banker. A sub-plot is provided through Winston Chan, a star fund manager who Donahue's firm backed for years, brokering money into his funds.
But Chan is feeling the heat as local regulatory bodies, media and rivals question the consistently glowing performance of his funds at a time when others are taking a drubbing.
Chan seeks his sponsor's help to bail him out. But with Donahue's death, any support he could count on is gone. The glittering facade of his Ponzi scheme can no longer last, and as the probe deepens against him, Chan flees Hong Kong, spending time on the run before eventually being caught in Florence.
In the fallout, investors stampede for the exit, fund prices plummet and murky facts begin to surface about Barker Reed's indiscretions and irregularities in its brokering for Chan.
For a writer conceiving a financial thriller, Hong Kong is an ideal setting: with its highly developed financial services; the number of people the industry employs; the cutthroat competition and ugly fights to achieve at the expense of others; and the stereotype of the scheming Chinese - or Asian - mind, vital to portrayals of East-West conflicts of interests.
Kim's novel is engrossing for many reasons: his elegant prose; fast-paced storytelling; an emerging global background as the story develops; and the realism provided by using the real names of locations and places.
But his greatest achievement is in presenting through stories how "too big to fail" corporate giants were easily toppled by the greed and dishonesty of a few powerful individuals, without invoking impenetrable jargon.
The story would be even fuller had it shifted a little from the troubles confronting high-living expats and burrowed more into the lives of locals.
Hong Kong is arguably among the most economically Darwinian places on earth, where people's sense of insecurity about their wealth is seldom appeased by a short bullish run on the Hang Seng Index.
Greed is never the shortcoming of just a few; it is a social pandemic from which few are immune. And the morality of Kim' story of overreaching greed would perhaps remain longer with his readers if discussed more in view of an insecure public.
This concentration of financial professionals in a densely populated place is also likely to be matched in Hong Kong's Central area, one of Asia's best-known financial clusters, teeming with investment bankers, fund managers and securities brokers.
So what would happen if something falls off a glitzy, towering office building in Central and kills someone as prominent as Jason Donahue?
Donahue is a figure central to Phillip Y. Kim's financial thriller "Nothing Gained." As the chief of the Asian operations of Barker Reed, a fictitious leading investment bank, he drowns while taking a nighttime swim with friends and colleagues.
His death drops a bombshell, sending shockwaves around the regional market and leaving his heartbroken family, mistress, company colleagues and business partners with hard questions to answer.
The timing of Donahue's death could hardly have been worse. It coincides with the 2008 world financial crisis and the start of the European debt debacle - two events that bring turmoil to the privileged lives of managers like Donahue. But his mess is even bigger, as he got himself into a shady deal concerning a casino project in Macau without his company's knowledge.
The deal went wrong and threatened to unravel after Donahue pocketed US$20 million as his personal fees out of the investors' US$120 payment. He justified this as "payback" for lobbying to get the go-ahead from authorities for the project.
But this "theft" deeply annoys the investor, a thuggish Vegas property contractor.
Donahue's sudden and suspicious death prompts the developer and his minions to mercilessly harass the banker's Korean-American widow into paying her husband's debts.
The story would be, of course, a little too simplistic if it merely revolved around the unethical deeds of a banker. A sub-plot is provided through Winston Chan, a star fund manager who Donahue's firm backed for years, brokering money into his funds.
But Chan is feeling the heat as local regulatory bodies, media and rivals question the consistently glowing performance of his funds at a time when others are taking a drubbing.
Chan seeks his sponsor's help to bail him out. But with Donahue's death, any support he could count on is gone. The glittering facade of his Ponzi scheme can no longer last, and as the probe deepens against him, Chan flees Hong Kong, spending time on the run before eventually being caught in Florence.
In the fallout, investors stampede for the exit, fund prices plummet and murky facts begin to surface about Barker Reed's indiscretions and irregularities in its brokering for Chan.
For a writer conceiving a financial thriller, Hong Kong is an ideal setting: with its highly developed financial services; the number of people the industry employs; the cutthroat competition and ugly fights to achieve at the expense of others; and the stereotype of the scheming Chinese - or Asian - mind, vital to portrayals of East-West conflicts of interests.
Kim's novel is engrossing for many reasons: his elegant prose; fast-paced storytelling; an emerging global background as the story develops; and the realism provided by using the real names of locations and places.
But his greatest achievement is in presenting through stories how "too big to fail" corporate giants were easily toppled by the greed and dishonesty of a few powerful individuals, without invoking impenetrable jargon.
The story would be even fuller had it shifted a little from the troubles confronting high-living expats and burrowed more into the lives of locals.
Hong Kong is arguably among the most economically Darwinian places on earth, where people's sense of insecurity about their wealth is seldom appeased by a short bullish run on the Hang Seng Index.
Greed is never the shortcoming of just a few; it is a social pandemic from which few are immune. And the morality of Kim' story of overreaching greed would perhaps remain longer with his readers if discussed more in view of an insecure public.
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