The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals

Product Description

At the height of the roaring ’20s, Swedish émigré Ivar Kreuger made a fortune raising money in America and loaning it to Europe in exchange for matchstick monopolies. His enterprise was a rare success story throughout the Great Depression.
Yet after Kreuger’s suicide in 1932, the true nature of his empire emerged. Driven by success to adopt ever-more perilous practices, Kreuger had turned to shell companies in tax havens, fudged accounting figures, off-balance-sheet accounting, even forgery. He created a raft of innovative financial products— many of them precursors to instruments wreaking havoc in today’s markets. When his Wall Street empire collapsed, millions went bankrupt.
Frank Partnoy, a frequent commentator on financial disaster for the Financial Times, New York Times, NPR, and CBS’s “60 Minutes,” recasts the life story of a remarkable yet forgotten genius in ways that force us to re-think our ideas about the wisdom of crowds, the invisible hand, and the free and unfettered market.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Partnoy (
F.I.A.S.C.O.) delivers a thrilling account of the grandfather of all Ponzi and Madoff schemes—Ivar Kreuger (1880–1932), who made his fortune in the 1920s by raising money from American investors to lend to European governments in exchange for match monopolies. Kreuger was creating more than matches, it turned out; the master of investor psychology created the forerunners of today’s derivatives and techniques that are still used by hedge funds and investment banks. Shortly after his suicide in 1932, his schemes finally unraveled. The Kreuger crash bankrupted millions and led to the securities laws of 1933 and 1934—a political reaction to a single event and to one man. Partnoy achieves a nuanced portrait of the charismatic and corrupt financial genius whose advice was sought by Herbert Hoover and other heads of state. A fascinating depiction of a man and his era (Greta Garbo makes memorable cameos), this book is a snapshot of a time all too familiar now: a speculative real estate bubble, unbridled consumer spending, investors buying derivatives based on sketchy information and a Wall Street operating by its own rules.
(May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Ivar Kreuger, the “best-liked crook that ever lived,” was a Swede who operated on Wall Street during the 1920s, and his apparent suicide in 1932 coincided with the collapse of his businesses, bankrupting millions of investors. Partnoy, author and academic, conducted extensive research on Kreuger, who was considered the greatest business mind of his time. He cornered global markets in safety matches by raising money in the U.S. and loaning it to European governments in return for monopoly control of production and sales; he devised and sold complicated financial products and with questionable accounting methods structured a long list of murky deals. Partnoy explains that Kreuger, while a crook, was an attractive one who created substantial wealth, revived much of post–World War I Europe, and generated real profits for investors before his empire collapsed. With the current arrest of Wall Street’s Bernard Madoff for stealing more than $60 billion from investors, we are reminded that history repeats itself. This is a timely and excellent book. –Mary Whaley

About the Author

Frank Partnoy is the author of
F.I.A.S.C.O.: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader and
Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Greed Corrupted the Financial Markets. He has worked as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and a corporate lawyer, and has testified as an expert before both the United States Senate and House of Representatives. A graduate of Yale Law School, he currently teaches law at the University of San Diego.

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post’s Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Liaquat Ahamed Human nature being what it is, at