In the late 1920s, governments wrecked by the First World War did not always turn to banks for hard currency. Some turned to one Swedish engineer. Ivar Kreuger, born in Kalmar in 1880, lent entire nations millions of dollars, and in return they passed laws giving him the exclusive right to make and sell matches inside their borders. He was known as the Match King, and for a time he functioned as a one man world bank.

This episode traces how he got there and how it fell apart. Kreuger began as a builder who brought reinforced concrete to Sweden and offered contracts with fixed completion dates, penalties for lateness, and bonuses for finishing early. He then consolidated the Scandinavian match industry and financed a global expansion with inventions still in use today, alongside shell companies, forged assets, and dividends paid with new investors’ money. His death in Paris in 1932 exposed hundreds of millions of dollars in assets that did not exist.

• Kreuger graduated from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm at 20 with two master’s degrees, in mechanical and civil engineering.
• His firm Kreuger and Toll, founded in 1908, built the Stockholm Olympic Stadium and paid early backers dividends of 15 percent.
• He sold the public B shares carrying one thousandth of a vote each, raising capital while keeping control, and created American certificates that were the precursor to American depositary receipts.
• Debts were moved onto the ledgers of paper companies in places like Liechtenstein and Switzerland, so public balance sheets showed large profits and almost no debt across a web of roughly 400 companies.
• After the Swedish central bank demanded an independent audit, Kreuger was found dead in his Paris apartment on March 12, 1932. The Kreuger crash helped inspire the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934.