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

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

Berning’s nervous breakdown finally brought Ivar out of hiding. Ivar was no stranger to mental illness. Both his mother and her father had problems. More recently, Ivar himself had been battling his own bouts of mania and depression while locked in his Silence Room. So he probably could relate to the breakdown.

Given these facts - and they were facts - Berning was reluctant to accuse such a reputable man of anything. He told himself Garanta wasn’t important. It couldn’t be.

What the passengers aboard Berengaria did not know was that Ivar spent hours every day just preparing to talk. When Ivar knew he would be meeting a new group of people, he planned the first impression he hoped to make in advance: whom to meet first, which nuggets of information to drop, and where to move next.

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.

Before 1922, Ivar had raised most of his capital in Europe, particularly from Swedish banks. As Ivar watched the Americans enter a period of buying mania, he saw a new source of funds. Ivar had studied financial history and was aware of infamous periods of mania and later panic, such as the South Sea Bubble of 1720 and the infamous rise and collaps

The monopoly-for-loan idea certainly was ingenious.

From the moment the two met, the power balance shifted, just as it had with Donald Durant in 1922. Ivar charmed Marcosson like no foreign leader or movie star ever had. Marcosson found Ivar soft and persuasive in speech, modest and unostentatious in manner. He was utterly without vanity, almost self-effacing. He seldom spoke of himself, and Marcoss

Ivar’s performance during these talks was enormously impressive, and he held forth on a tapestry of topics. According to one source, every night Ivar would stuff his memory with details about some obscure matter, such as Hungarian financial statistics, and the next day he would ensure that the topic came up and then would recite every memorized det