The Rise and Fall of the Match King

One historian calls Ivar Kreuger The Match King. He was a financial genius and master of deception who built a global empire on innovation, speculation, and fraud. In the 1920s, he was one of the world’s most powerful financiers—until his empire collapsed in scandal. His story is a cautionary tale for business professionals, highlighting the dangers of unchecked ambition, financial engineering, and the illusion of stability. Understanding Kreuger’s rise and fall offers valuable ethics, risk, and leadership lessons.

Book Discussion Highlights of The Match King

Comparisons to Sam Bankman-Fried, the Enron leadership team, Elizabeth Holmes, and Bernie Madoff.
Why read and study Ivar Kreuger?
An Andy Burt short biography.
Mark confesses his ignorance of the Ivar Kreuger story.
A story made for Hollywood.
The three books about Kreuger.
Kreuger’s youth and relationship with his father.
A degreed structural engineer turned financial engineer.
Per Andy, “If he didn’t exist, Ayn Rand would have had to invent him.”
The origin of the match industry and its rollup story.
Kreuger’s legal monopolies strategies with foreign countries.
Dividend rates that were impossible to sustain.
Would Buffett invest in Swedish Match in the 1920s?
The fall of Ivar Kreuger and when the unraveling began.
Did he take his own life?
Who should read this book and why?

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

$2.49

Frank Partnoy, a frequent commentator on financial disasters 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.

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

Browse Book

03/26/2025 05:56 pm GMT

Five Questions for Andy Burt on The Match King

CFO Bookshelf: Why did you want to talk about The Match King?

Andy: I’ve always had a fascination with the white collar criminal element, especially since I’ve been in business media and a big part of my role has been the duality of finding interesting stories and then telling them in a compelling way. I won’t lie – some of my favorite films are movies such as “Oceans 11” and “Matchstick Men.” I think there’s a really interesting psychology behind people who find crime to be a more worthy challenge to their professional goals. But I’m also a fan of the Elmore Leonard style of criminals, who are generally dumb and do dumb things. Danny Ocean, they ain’t.

But this guy – Ivar Krueger – he’s like something out of modern cinema, and you and I agreed that he’d make a wonderful onscreen anti-hero. He’s a European Danny Ocean and his impact on high finance was so significant that it played a big part in the creation of securities law and accounting standards that we observe today. Everyone should know the name Ivan Kroeger.

CFO Bookshelf: Why should any student of business be interested in the life of Ivar Kreuger?

Andy: Aside from the fact that we as human beings have a natural curiosity towards those whose business ethics are, shall we say, malleable, the author asserts, and I tend to agree, that you can’t simply say that he was a swindler or a con man. He was legitimately brilliant with an astute mind toward engineering, finance, and human psychology. He built a powerful legacy based on real businesses that produced real things, and was also one of the early banking innovators, creating financial instruments such as gold debentures and Class B-shares that nobody even knew were possible.

If Ivar were alive today, he would definitely have a quite popular podcast.

CFO Bookshelf: Would Buffett have invested in an Ivar Kreuger business?

Andy: Buffett has his enumerated investing principles that most are aware of, so I won’t rehash, but I will choose two to examine through the Ivar Kroeger lens.

Pick businesses, not stocks – Buffett needed to be able to examine a company inside and out in order to justify an investment. Kreuger’s underlying business of match production around the world was a legitimate business that, through Kreuger’s dealings, had virtually no competition in the countries where he set up. If that were the only element of Ivar’s business approach, Warren might be interested. But…Avoid debt – And that’s where this falls apart (aside from all the obfuscation, fraud, and outright crimes of counterfeiting and forgery). Kreuger expanded his empire through layers and layers of shell companies, subsidiaries, and lots and lots of debt. Everyone was loaning to somebody else, and his ability to keep onlookers from having a clear view of how much money Kreuger had borrowed was the biggest reason why he lasted as long as he did.

CFO Bookshelf: What impact did the fall of Kreuger businesses have on American securities law?

Andy: One of the more interesting things about reading this book is it almost feels like you’re reading the history of GAAP and securities law because so many of the things he was able to get away with eventually were codified in the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934, as well as accounting disclosure standards.

As the author Partnoy notes in his final chapter, “The lesson of Ivar Kreuger is not that his businesses were illegal. It is that they were legal.”

The world of finance had to change. Kreuger unwittingly was a catalyst for that change, which makes it all the more amazing that so few know who he was.

CFO Bookshelf: If you were doing a TEDx presentation on Ivar Kreuger, what would you sneak in your limited time of less than 19 minutes?

Andy: I had the chance to hear Frank Abignale give a keynote several years ago at a supply chain conference. His story has held peoples’ attention for decades and was made into a movie, “Catch Me If You Can.” Regardless of whether this story itself is an accurate telling of his escapades (it’s almost even more perfect if the ‘truths’ he told are, in fact, not), he ended his keynote by imploring us not to follow the path that he had, to pursue good things instead.

As I mentioned above, there is a fascinating psychology of white-collar criminals. I remember a story once where the child of the uber-rich would park his car wherever he wanted to, and if it got a ticket, that was simply the price of parking there, no more, no less. There is an interesting detachment that I would want to explore. When you loosen your morals, you’re still playing the same game as everyone else, but you’ve reshaped the rules to your favor in ways that others have not.

In Partnoy’s coda, he writes that in 1984, Kreuger made the Financial Times list of the top 5 financial scandals of all time. I’d talk about that top five list and explore what made each incident more similar than different and the takeaways we can learn from the psychological makeup.