"The Match King" Ivar Kreuger and the Largest Fraud of the Twentieth Century

About This Episode

When the German government needed a hundred and twenty-five million dollars in 1929, it did not go to a country. It went to a Swedish engineer who controlled roughly three quarters of the world's match production and had already lent money to France, Poland, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Peru, and more than two dozen other governments. Newspapers called Ivar Kreuger the savior of Europe. His companies paid dividends above twenty percent for fifteen straight years, through a decade when almos