Ninety Days to Double Your Money: Charles Ponzi in Boston
The 1920 postal reply coupon scheme that gave the Ponzi scheme its name, how a Boston newspaper and a sceptical financial editor pulled it apart, and what the investors actually got back.
The Match King: Ivar Kreuger's Paper Empire
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Show notes
The Match King
Ivar Kreuger lent money to France, Germany and Poland in exchange for match monopolies, and for a decade he was treated as one of the most reliable financiers in the world. After his death in Paris in March 1932, auditors found forged Italian treasury bonds and a group structure nobody could map.
- How a match business became a lender to governments
- The accounting trick of moving profits between hundreds of subsidiaries
- Why American investors trusted him more than their own banks
- The audit that took Price Waterhouse months to untangle
- What changed in securities law afterwards
A quieter story than Ponzi, and a much larger one.
Transcript
Welcome back to The Confidence Ledger. I am Harriet Lowndes. Last time we watched Charles Ponzi's scheme fall apart in a single Boston summer. Today's story is bigger, slower and much stranger. Ivar Kreuger was a Swedish engineer who ended up controlling roughly three quarters of the world's match production, and then used that business to lend money to entire governments. Bankers in New York called him the safest man in Europe. In 1932, after his death in a Paris flat, the auditors opened his safe and found Italian treasury bonds that had been drawn by hand. In this episode we trace how a real company and a real product became the cover for a balance sheet that only ever existed in one man's head, and why so many clever people chose not to look. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Let us begin.
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