The Match King

What actually happened

Kreuger's model traded loans to governments for national match monopolies in Germany, France, Poland and more, funded by American investors hungry for his securities. The empire's accounting was a private matter: he kept the real numbers in his head and told auditors what balance was needed.

In March 1932, with markets collapsed and refinancing impossible, Kreuger died in a Paris apartment: three notes and a pistol; ruled suicide, though questions persist. The Price Waterhouse autopsy of his books found the forged Italian bonds and losses vast enough that the scandal helped produce the US Securities Acts and the SEC.

The word for what he ran was not yet standard, so the newspapers borrowed a name from a Boston swindler of 1920: a Ponzi scheme, at sovereign scale.

The play to remember

Opacity plus prestige is a currency. Kreuger's real product wasn't matches. It was the appearance of being too established to audit.