The Curious Capitalist – TIME.com

Forget Charles Ponzi (and Bernie Madoff). Ivar Kreuger is the all-time fraud champ

kreuger A lot of people have been calling Bernie Madoff's apparent $50 billion Ponzi scheme the biggest financial fraud in history. Christopher McKenna, a business historian at Oxford University who stopped by TIME for a visit today, doubts it.

"I think Kreuger is bigger," he says. "The question is how do you measure that. His losses were greater than the entire debt of Sweden at that time."

Kreuger is Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish match-stick king (or tåndstick konung, as TIME put it in on the October 28, 1929 cover reproduced above). Kreuger's global match empire survived the 1929 stock market crash, but as it unraveled in 1932 he killed himself, and the whole thing was subsequently revealed to be a giant pyramid scheme. When sociologists began developing their first theories of white collar crime in the 1930s. "they were basically referring to Kreuger," says McKenna.

McKenna knows about all this stuff because, after writing an acclaimed history of management consulting (published in 2006) he set to work studying the history of white-collar crime. McKenna says one of his former professors tried to warn him off the subject because he worried that, in the post-Enron era, interest in the subject would fade. Guess not.


1 Comment or Trackback to “Forget Charles Ponzi (and Bernie Madoff). Ivar Kreuger is the all-time fraud champ”

  1. jumpinjack84 Says:

    How bizarre is that Krueger was on the cover of Time the week of the stock market crash? And he killed himself a few months before the market bottomed in '32?

    This should be considered the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Feed Icon RSS Feed
AddThis Feed Button

Daily Email

Get The Curious Capitalist - TIME.com in your inbox and never miss a day:
 
Delivered by   FeedBurner

advertisement
About Curious Capitalist
Justin Fox

Justin Fox is TIME's business and economics columnist. This is his blog. Read more

Barbara Kiviat

Barbara Kiviat recently celebrated her 6-year anniversary covering business and economics for TIME magazine. Read more

The Curious Capitalist - TIME.com Archives

January 2009
Choose a day to view headlines.

< Previous Month
> Next Month

S M T W T F S
        1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
More TIME Blogs
  • Swampland
    A blog about politics by TIME's Joe Klein, Jay Newton-Small, Michael Scherer, Amy Sullivan, and Karen Tumulty.
  • The China Blog
    Daily detours through the world's fastest changing nation by TIME correspondents
  • Tuned In
    A blog about all things television from TIME's TV critic, James Poniewozik
  • Looking Around
    Reflections on art and architecture by TIME critic Richard Lacayo
  • The Middle East
    TIME correspondents blog about life in the hottest and holiest region in the world
  • Nerd World
    Geek culture blog by TIME's Lev Grossman and The Simpsons' Matt Selman
advertisement