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• The match king  

By 1917 Kreuger was done with construction engineering; he founded the Swedish Match Company and his reign as one of the world's great monopolists—and financial engineers—began in earnest.

Just over a decade later in 1928, The Economist, writing of Swedish Match, noted: “It is curious that of the great international trusts in the industrial world there is none more firmly established than the colossus that has been built on matchsticks.” . . .

Swedish Match, he confided, had “not felt any effect of the present crisis...Often great unemployment causes an increase in the consumption of matches because people seem to smoke more cigarettes when they are not working.”

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