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.