Kreuger: Genius and Swindler, by Robert Shaplen (Knopf, $4.50). In 1931, the Swiss banker Felix So-mary predicted that the economic crisis would not end before the world had seen “a banking collapse in Austria and Germany, the renunciation by England of the gold standard, and the bankruptcy of Ivar Kreuger.” A year later, on March 12, 1932, Kreuger, the charismatic Swedish “Match King,” shot himself to death in a Paris apartment, and the match house came tumbling down—revealing, to the extreme pain of many, an airy paper empire sustained by billions of dollars’ worth of imaginary assets in constant flux, via imaginary banks, among dozens of imaginary companies.
Since Kreuger shot himself, he has been the subject of perhaps a dozen books. Although this latest is a lucid, thorough treatment of the Kreuger empire, Mr. Shaplen, an organization man in spirit, a New Yorker writer in fact, and—when it comes to Kreuger—clearly in over his head, could not resist pondering what made Kreuger so anti-social. (“Kreuger’s capacity
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