Biography of Ivar Kreuger, the entrepreneur who built a global match empire in the 1920s and 1930s. Through aggressive financial engineering, he became a banker to nations. He raised money in the U.S. stock market and used those funds to issue loans to governments in exchange for national match monopolies. The book describes how a mix of opaque financials, fraud, overextension, and the stock market crash ultimately brought down his empire — and led to his death.