The Match King

Ivar Kreuger, the Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals

De: Frank Partnoy

Narrado por: L. J. Ganser

At the height of the roaring 20s, Swedish émigré Ivar Kreuger made a fortune raising money in America and loaning it to Europe in exchange for matchstick monopolies. His enterprise was a rare success story throughout the Great Depression.

Yet after Kreuger's suicide in 1932, the true nature of his empire emerged. Driven by success to adopt ever-more perilous practices, Kreuger had turned to shell companies in tax havens, fudged accounting figures, off-balance-sheet accounting, even forgery. He created a raft of innovative financial products - many of them precursors to instruments wreaking havoc in today's markets. When his Wall Street empire collapsed, millions went bankrupt.

Frank Partnoy, a frequent commentator on financial disaster for the Financial Times, The New York Times, NPR, and CBS's 60 Minutes, recasts the life story of a remarkable yet forgotten genius in ways that force us to rethink our ideas about the wisdom of crowds, the invisible hand, and the free and unfettered market.

©2009 Frank Partnoy (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"A fascinating depiction of a man and his era (Greta Garbo makes memorable cameos), this book is a snapshot of a time all too familiar now: a speculative real estate bubble, unbridled consumer spending, investors buying derivatives based on sketchy information and a Wall Street operating by its own rules." ( Publishers Weekly)

Among the best historical listens

A well read tale and unbelievable history that I teuly cannot believe I have never heard of this having actually happened. If you were/are on the fence of deciding your next book, then worry no more. Really a high quality story line with great detail! Highest recommendation!

Great Topics, Interesting Man, OK Book

I like the story of Ivar Kreuger, the financial innovations he created, and the time of the roaring 20s.
However, the book itself doesn't have a good flow, doesn't follow a consistent timeline (jumps back and then forward again), and repeats itself on some topics.
At many points I found that I stopped caring on the particulars of the negotiations and financial engineering details.
The narrator didn't help. Would take long inhaling pauses that bothered me. And talked like someone from the time period telling you the story on an old time radio.

Overall a good story, just not well executed IMO.

Fascinating

As a banker and CPA I found the book enthralling. The characters, and what they schemed and accomplished could have been written last week. I never knew that such sophisticated and complicated financing existed in the 1920's. The author describes the financial details so anyone can understand them. I think he could have better developed the various national economies that Kreuger did business in better. His main focus is on Kreuger and at times it appears he is a universe onto himself apart from world affairs. It seems the world depression was just one of many events that get a mention. One does not get an impression that Kreuger, with all of his financial acumen and personal knowledge of world leaders could have foretold what would happen.
I found the coda far fetched. The author seems to feel that all aspects of Kreuger's death have to be explained or theorized upon. Since none of his scenarios can be verified they take on the aura of the worst of sensationalist tabloid journalism.
Aside from the very last chapter, I found the book fascinating, useful and highly recommend it.

Solid; tale and telling not ideal; gasping reader

This is solid history but is of necessity full of elaborate economic schemes, many with numbers counted to places in cents, so it is sometimes tedious or hard to follow as audio. I think the book could still benefit from more dramatic, concise summary statements of what Kreuger was up to as punctuation or prefaces to the multi-paged econ-text book versions of Kreuger's plots (often drained of a vital sense of Kreuger's fear, cunning, and deceptions) that dominate the narrative. The dilution of drama may be intentional; the book's conclusion tries to rationalize Kreuger's lunatic-on-its-face forgery of Italian bonds and make him pitiable. Even in this narrative, Kreuger himself seems too much a character of Shakespearean hybris for this whitewash to work. The reader is good, but inconsistently anglicizes some European names; his anglicizing "Weimar" Germany as "Wimer" and the country Lichtenstein as " . . . STEEN" (not even in the dictionary, that) seems discordant given that the title character's name, e.g., is not anglicized. The reader also needed an audio director: he has a strange habit--I am not sure how any professional reader would not be aware of this, or why he has not been simply, emphatically directed out of it--about once a page, he pauses for emphasis and inhales through his mouth with an audible gasp. It is a tad bizarre and I found this distracting, but others may not care. In any case, he is the first audio book reader I have ever heard do this.

The Match King

This book is fabulous. Just when I thought the interest level had peaked, it got more interesting, right up to the end.