The Devils of American Finance - Past and Present

1920s: THE MATCH KING

In the 1920s and '30s, Ivar Kruegar was a Swedish entrepreneur who engineered a worldwide monopoly on matches, eventually controlling nearly 75 percent of the world’s demand. Featured on the cover of Time Magazine, he was thought one of the few businessmen to survive the Crash of '29 and subsequent Great Depression. But although some of the companies were doing well and one survives to this day, Krueger had been inflating his empire with non-existent assets. The "Leonardo of larcenists," as Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith dubbed him, Krueger shot himself to death in March of 1933, just as Franklin Roosevelt was about to take office. His death set off a world-wide ‘Krueger Crash’ that hit the U.S. and Sweden particularly hard.

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