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The Match King cover

The Match King

Frank Partnoy

#3383 of 3,809 books · #100 in Business & Economics

Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Standard Chartered Business Book of the Year Award (2009).

At the height of the roaring '20s, Swedish migré 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. The life story of a remarkable yet forgotten genius is recast in ways that force us to re-think our ideas about the wisdom of crowds, the invisible hand, and the free and unfettered market.

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Publisher
PublicAffairs
ISBN-13
9780786741540
Topics
Financial fraudGreat DepressionCorporate scandal

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