The Match King: Ivar Kreuger's Paper Empire
Ivar Kreuger controlled most of the world's match production and lent money to governments, until the 1932 collapse revealed forged bonds and balance sheets that existed mainly in his head.
Ninety Days to Double Your Money: Charles Ponzi in Boston
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Show notes
Ninety days to double your money
In the summer of 1920 Charles Ponzi was taking in a million dollars a week from ordinary Bostonians on the promise of 50 percent returns in 45 days. Harriet walks through the arithmetic that made the scheme impossible from the first day.
- Why international postal reply coupons sounded clever and could never have worked at scale
- The Boston Post investigation and the financial editor who did the sums
- How the run on Ponzi's office actually unfolded over one week
- What the receivers recovered and how long repayments took
Next time we leave Boston for the match factories of Sweden and a far bigger collapse.
Transcript
Hello and welcome. I am Harriet Lowndes and this is The Confidence Ledger, the show where we follow the money through the great frauds of history. Today we are in Boston in the summer of 1920, standing in a queue outside a small office on School Street where a charming Italian immigrant is promising to double your savings in ninety days. His name is Charles Ponzi, and the scheme that will carry his name for the next century lasts less than a year. Here is the thing that still surprises me. The arithmetic was impossible from the very first deposit, and plenty of people said so out loud. So why did it keep growing? We will go through the sums, the newspaper that finally did them in public, and what the investors got back. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Let us open the ledger.
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