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Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals
PublicAffairs
April 2009
On Sale: April 13, 2009
288 pages ISBN: 1586487434 EAN: 9781586487430 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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, 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 re-think our ideas
about the wisdom of crowds, the invisible hand, and the free
and unfettered market.
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