Ivar Kreuger Reaction

In late 2008, I remember my father complaining about losing a significant amount of money in the stocks he had been investing in at the time. I asked him why his stocks were doing so poorly, and he told me in the simplest terms an uninformed fourteen year old could understand. In addition to a variety of other more complex factors I wouldn’t comprehend, a lot of negative news was being reported about the performance of a variety of different companies and the recent spike in unemployment rates had caused investors to become pessimistic about the stock market and in response want to sell their stocks, causing stock prices to drop. After thinking about this for a moment, I wondered what would happen if instead of reporting on all of the bad things happening to these companies, the media instead remained positive and reported on only good things. …show more content…
Instead of portraying him as an evil scam artist as one would expect a book about such a scam to do, he eloquently captured a variety of facets of Ivar’s personality, giving the reader a well-rounded knowledge of Ivar as a person, his companies, what led him to such risky business practices, and his untimely suicide. At first I wasn’t sure if a book about the stock market would keep me interested for 250 pages, but soon after beginning to read I was hooked into the story and truly enjoyed the read. After reading The Match King, my knowledge about how the stock market and what led to The Great Depression has increased exponentially, and definitely serves as a reminder to me personally as a potential future investor to not get caught up in securities that seem to have surprisingly low risk with an enormously above average return. For as Ivar Kreuger’s investors and the rest of the world before the 1928 stock market crash eventually found out, when an investment opportunity seems too good to be true, it probably