The Match King

Ivar Kreuger and the Financial Scandal of the Century

Frank Partnoy

ISBN 186197938X

ISBN 13 9781861979384

March 2010

Price £8.99

Paperback, 288 pp.

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Subject: Business

Other formats available: Hardback

‘An enthralling cautionary tale of the recurring excesses of global finance … The author displays a vivid touch in describing the Swedish parvenu’s successful efforts to infiltrate the upper echelons of US finance.’ Francesco Guerrera, Financial Times

The story opens with the purchase of a 9mm Browning at a small Paris gun shop by a man named Ivar Kreuger. The next morning, the world's leading bankers nervously waited to ask Ivar about some forged Italian bonds. Hours later, his dead body was discovered and the largest financial empire of the era collapsed.

This book traces Ivar's meteoric rise from the obscurity of provincial Sweden, to become a construction mogul and then a global business oligarch. Ivar acquired match monopolies throughout the world and usurped J. P. Morgan to become the leading lender to foreign governments. His financial innovations resonate today. A self made media figure, he discovered and promoted Greta Garbo but also advised politicians, including President Hoover.

Was he a financial genius or merely a schemer? Did he really stage his own suicide? This book brings back to life one of the greatest swindlers of all times.

‘Partnoy vividly recreates the turbulent Wall Street of the 1920s to tell the story of the Swedish magnate whose death precipitated the “Kreuger crash” of 1932. A powerful reminder that today’s scandals had vast and destructive predecessors’
— Financial Times

‘An enthralling cautionary tale of the recurring excesses of global finance…The author displays a vivid touch in describing the Swedish parvenu’s successful efforts to infiltrate the upper echelons of US finance.’
— Francesco Guerrera, Financial Times