This is John Batchel, a conversation with colleague Charles Ortell in Southeast Asia,

about seeing ahead at the China market at the beginning of the 1990s.

The big banks who were recommending investment in China, did they see the bubble?

Did they tell the clients about the bubble?

Charles answers from the point of view of the stock market.

And who warned? Gordon warned.

Here's Charles Ortele, a long-time investor living in Southeast Asia,

about the bubble that has collapsed and why foreign investment is desired in China but not coming,

not again, not until Charles O'Tell, much more of this tonight.

Well, I think Gordon was the great visionary who saw this way before I did, but I think that there were, there's some, the folks who invented the term bricks,

there was a Goldman Sachs, I believe vice chairman who took credit for God's credit for that.

They got together on Wall Street and they sold this fiction, which I never bought into,

that serious investors would want to buy

basically stock that is not actually like the stock you and I'm invested in the U.S.

and other more rigorously managed markets.

And the euphoria just took shape.

Now, I do know one person who is a legendary shortseller, Jim Chanos,

who called this long ago and definitely acted on it. But it's tough to short the equity

securities in a tightly controlled country like China, because they, at the last minute,

could follow the U.S. example of 2007 through 9 and change the rules at the last second to target short sellers.

That said, Chanos is one of the best of the best, and I think he's probably sitting on some huge gains.