Swindlers List: Before Bernie Madoff, there was Ivar Kreuger.

• Author: Taussig, Doron
• Position: ON POLITICAL BOOKS - The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, the Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals - Book review

The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, the Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals

by Frank Partnoy

Public Affairs, 288 pp.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Did you have a chance to read Bernie Madoff's plea agreement? I found it fascinating. The thing is dearly heavily lawyered, and probably PR-professionalized. Still, read this nugget, and bear in mind that it's coming from someone who swindled Elie Wieseh

I am actually grateful for this first opportunity to speak publicly about my crimes, for which I am so deeply sorry and ashamed. As I engaged in my fraud, I knew what I was doing was wrong, indeed criminal. When I began the Ponzi scheme I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme. However, this proved difficult, and ultimately impossible, and as the years went by I realized that my arrest and this day would inevitably come. What are we supposed to do with this? Do we try to take it seriously? Because really, given everything that's happened, how can we? I feel like I can't find an appropriate context for engaging with it. Just reading it feels awkward, like riding the bus home with someone who's just mugged you.

It's hard to get your head around greed like Madoff's. But it's worth trying, if only to better spot future swindlers. A good way to begin is to take a closer look at previous ones.

One such individual was Ivar Kreuger. A Swedish industrialist in the 1920s whose core business was matches--a ubiquitous product at the time, used for heating, cooking, lighting, and smoking--Kreuger was also an international financier, and such a gifted one that his businesses survived the 1929 stock market crash. Eventually, though, the collapse of global finance caught up to him, and when it did, some troublesome details about his practices came to light. Word spread that he was a fraud. And yet, he was, somewhat oddly, completely forgotten.

Enter Frank Partnoy, once a banker at Morgan Stanley, now a professor of law and a chronicler of Wall Street greed and malfeasance. Partnoy's mission in his new book, The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, the Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals, is to revive Kreuger, and to reconsider him--to assess how much of the man's business was legitimate, and how he pulled off the illegitimate parts. Let's stipulate up front that this isn't the easiest book to read: Partnoy's attempts to humanize his subject, such as vague allusions to Kreuger's...