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

It seems to me that Mr Kreuger’s policy is to carefully select the man for each post and then to give him complete responsibility for the duties therein involved. I was considerably impressed with the complete harmony with which the organizations function and the extreme confidence that each one has in the other. There seems to be throughout the en

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

Occasionally Ivar would ask a question about IT&T and one of the men from the other side would leave the room for an hour to get an answer. But when someone from IT&T asked a question, Ivar always stayed put and answered from memory.

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.

Construction firms had not been willing to take on the risk associated with delays; instead, they put that risk on their clients. But Ivar understood a fundamental proposition about the allocation of risk: both parties to a deal can gain when the party in the best position to bear a risk takes on that risk. Construction firms, not clients, were in

The monopoly-for-loan idea certainly was ingenious.

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.

He also mentioned Ivar’s response to a question about what three things accounted most for his success. The answer, which became emblazoned in the public’s memory, was: “One is silence; the second is more silence; while the third is still more silence.”

Morgan’s famous testimony to Congress that character came before money or property.