The Book Prize Index

The Match King

Frank Partnoy

At the height of the roaring '20s, Swedish emigre 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.

Business & EconomicsBusiness & Economics · high confidenceBusiness & Economics81 signalsLlm Classifier: Business & Economics -> Business & EconomicsOpen Library: Biography -> BiographyOpen Library: Sweden, biography -> BiographyClimate, Weather & DisasterMental Health & PsychologyBusiness, Capitalism & CorporationsEmpire & Colonialism

Award History

0 wins · 1 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
FT Business Book of the YearMajor2009ShortlistSecondary source
View all award history (1)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    • Ivar Kreuger86%

  2. 02 Central places

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • Wall Street72%

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    No argument inferred with sufficient confidence.

    This suggestion did not meet the normal display threshold and is more likely to be wrong.

    Kreuger’s rise and fall show that success can drive increasingly perilous financial practices—hiding risk through accounting and offshore structures—leading to massive bankruptcies and undermining faith in markets.

    Model confidence 45%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    30 / 100 academic

    Serious trade

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 74%.