Did his basic idea— loans for match monopolies — work as a financial model?
I think it did. He made money on many of these monopolies he was able to secure in Poland and France. During the weekend of the crash of 1929 he was negotiating for one in Germany, and that’s where things went wrong. If he had backed out then and said,”The market is crashing and I am not overextending myself,” his business could have been profitable. After the crash, Kreuger managed to muddle through for a few years, but mostly through a series of increasingly desperate measures. He actually closed one of his biggest issues in the U.S. during the crash and continued to raise money in the U.S. throughout that period. The French paid his loan back just in time, so that he was able to lend money to Germany. He kept suggesting to investors that he was going to get a big monopoly with Italy. And he winds up forging the names of Italian government officials on documents. He was so bad at it that he actually misspelled their names. By 1931 and 1932 this is all starting to come apart. More and
