The Match King

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

Frank Partnoy author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:PublicAffairs,U.S.

Published:9th Mar '10

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Match King cover

At the height of the roaring '20s, Swedish émigré 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 his suicide in 1932, it became clear that Kreuger was not all he seemed: evidence surfaced of 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. In this gripping financial biography, Frank Partnoy 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.

  • Short-listed for Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2009

ISBN: 9781586488123

Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 18mm

Weight: 350g

288 pages