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

Jack Morgan might have the minds of other American bankers, but Ivar had the hearts of American investors, and those investors now had the power. Ivar didn’t need to lend his own money to France. Instead, he could act as an intermediary, raising money from the Americans and lending their money.

According to Ivar, by 1932 he had 225 subsidiaries. He had operations in every civilized country except Russia, and he manufactured three-quarters of the world’s matches. Ivar had secured match monopolies in twenty-four countries. During seven years, he had loaned almost 300 million dollars to European governments. Ivar’s loans had helped borrower

Occasionally Ivar would ask a question about IT&T and one of the men from the other side would leave the room for an hour to get an answer. But when someone from IT&T asked a question, Ivar always stayed put and answered from memory.

By 1922, Ivar secretly had hired a handful of men with no previous connection to him or his companies. These men trusted Ivar for all the wrong reasons: because he had saved them from prison or bribed them or paid them five times what they deserved. Ivar could ask these men to do things he would never ask of friends. Sometimes Ivar needed a person

He also mentioned Ivar’s response to a question about what three things accounted most for his success. The answer, which became emblazoned in the public’s memory, was: “One is silence; the second is more silence; while the third is still more silence.”

The monopoly-for-loan idea certainly was ingenious.

While the factories of Europe worked overnight to produce war materials, Ivar quietly purchased match factories throughout Sweden.13 He was a pioneer of vertical integration, buying timber tracts and chemical factories to secure the raw materials needed to make matches. Finally, he merged the leading Swedish competitors to form Swedish Match, a sin

While Jack Morgan was ensuring that he would have a direct bedroom-to-deck path on his new yacht, Ivar had tiptoed into the deal of the century.

Ivar devised a more elegant solution to this problem. It was an ingenious piece of financial engineering that would survive the test of time. Ivar decided to introduce a new type of security, which he called a “B Share.” Ivar began with Swedish Match. He divided its common shares into two classes. Each class would have the same claim to dividends a