Just finished listening to Frank Partnoy's The Match King in the car. It tells the story of Ivar Kreuger, the construction and match magnate who captivated the world with his financial shenanigans in the late twenties and early thirties, then killed himself when the shaky foundations of his empire fell apart during the Depression. It's a great story, sometimes rather nerve-wracking as the reader waits for the other shoe to drop.
Kreuger is often likened to Ponzi for having put together a pyramid scheme, and he was surely a shyster, but there were apparently very real assets within his enterprises even at the time of his suicide, enough so that investors were eventually paid out more than the average holders of stocks who bought and held through the same period. Partnoy makes a very good point that Kreuger had the misfortune of being the public face of a lot of very slack and questionable behavior by a wide range of actors. It's so much easier to hang systemic failures on individuals.
Not that he wasn't a shyster.
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