A closer look
Swedish match king Ivar Kreuger controlled over two-thirds of the entire global match production in the 1920s by lending massive sums of money to desperate European governments in exchange for absolute national monopolies. He pioneered complex financial instruments and off-balance-sheet accounting tricks that literally nobody else understood, creating a sprawling corporate empire built entirely on fake numbers and unparalleled charisma. When the Great Depression hit and his massive Ponzi scheme inevitably unraveled, the economic fallout was so catastrophic that it caused a wave of suicides among investors and forced Wall Street to adopt modern accounting regulations. The man basically invented the concept of cooking the books on an international scale, making modern corporate fraudsters look like absolute amateurs. It is wildly impressive how much global chaos was directly caused by the guy selling little wooden sticks that catch fire
