The Match King: The $13 Billion Fraud Two Auditors Broke

$13 billion in today's money, hidden inside a company that controlled two-thirds of every match struck on earth. Ivar Kreuger lent money to governments in exchange for national match monopolies, then funded those loans with securities backed by nothing but the next loan. Kreuger & Toll was the most respected name in European finance. He paid dividends out of capital, kept the books in a private office no auditor entered, and forged Italian treasury bonds when he ran short. Every new country bought time on the last one. In March 1932 two auditors were finally let into the accounts. It took them eleven days to find the hole. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CHAPTERS 00:00 — The Man Who Ran Out of Exits 00:54 — The Three-Word Answer 04:21 — The Loan the Size of a Country 08:56 — The Twenty Percent That Never Existed 10:35 — The Bonds That Were Never Printed 12:12 — The Twenty-Eight Million That Wasn't There 13:27 — The Last Morning in Paris 17:25 — The Law His Collapse Wrote ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ SOURCES & FURTHER READING Price, Waterhouse & Co. — post-mortem report on the Kreuger & Toll estate Irving Trust Company — bankruptcy trustee reports, International Match Corporation U.S. Senate Committee on Banking and Currency — Stock Exchange Practices hearings, testimony of George O. May TIME magazine archive — contemporaneous reporting on the Price Waterhouse findings The New York Times archive — March 1932 Frank Partnoy — The Match King Kramer & Previts — Ivar Kreuger and IMCO: a case of taxation of fictitious income Riksarkivet (Swedish National Archives) — Kreuger & Toll company records MeasuringWorth and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics — CPI real-price conversion Losses to the investing public totalled $560 million in 1932 dollars — roughly $13 billion today, adjusted for inflation (CPI real-price basis). ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ABOUT FOLLY FOLLY investigates financial crime — the frauds, schemes and collapses that moved real money out of real people's hands, reconstructed from the documentary record. Fortunes built on nothing. A new investigation every week. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #TheMatchKing #MatchKingFraud #ForgedBonds #IvarKreuger #SwedishMatch #KreugerAndToll #FinancialCrime #Documentary #WallStreetHistory #History