HIGH FINANCE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 10 January 1931, Page 11

HIGH FINANCE

IVAR KREUGER SWEDISH WORLD BANKER LONDON, 19th November. The wizards of post-war finance, who still exercise the power that once invested them, are gradually becoming rare. 11l the belligerent countries which underwent the violent economic reverses of the war quick minds were able to deal with rapidly changing problems and tasks when slow minds, however strong and calm, were just bewildered. Bijt in neutral countries there was a great chance for the cool and attentive calculator, and the man who made use of this chance is Mr Ivar Kreuger, the controller of the Swedish Match Company, with all its associates, and of other great and flourishing enterprises. Mr Kreuger’s career is now at his height. He has watched the war and its economic consequences, but he has also kept a mind attuned to the more normal behaviour of the Western world. His success, in fact, is attributed to his belief, even in the wildest inflation period, that the values of calmer times would again pretty quickly come to be esteemed, and on that belief he had the nerve to act. When other post-war wizards were rushing into ever newer, ever wider schemes for profiting by human changeableness, while they were foreseeing nations rapidly revising their whole mode of living, and were straining to be first with the new objects of desire —silk pyjamas, greyhounds, automatic restaurants, or whatever it might be —Ivar Kreuger was calculating that men a few years hence would again greatly prize sound securities yielding a safe 5 per cent, as they had done before the war. In this year we are witnessing a world gilt-edged boom, and Mr Ivar Kreuger is the world’s foremost holder of Government credit. In the current number of “Foreign Affairs” is an article, “The Match Stick Colossus,’ ’by Mr J. F. Deck. It tells how Mr Kreuger, in the match business alone, controls 150 to 160 factories, in over thirty-five different countries, employing 60,000 men; how he further commands the largest ironfields in Europe, and one of the largest wood-pulp interests; and how the assets of his group have perhaps increased fivefold in six years, till they value 630,000,000 dollars. But though the article is only just published, and was brought well up to date to the day of publication, one must already supplement it with fresh news. Mr Deck records the agreements made by Mr Kreuger with nine European States— Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Jugoslavia, Rumania, Greece, Germany, and Danzig—and with three South American States, whereby he acquires monopoly rights in return for conceding cash loans. In a footnote lie adds Lithuania and Turkey to the list; but now another footnote would be needed to mention a new agreement with the Polish Government, prolonging the monopoly for a further twenty years beyond the original seven years, in return for a cash loan of £6,500,000, as well as conversations with Soviet Russia now announced to be broken off. (Another footnote should add that he is about to start mining gold in North Sweden.) Mr Kreuger has probably further put up a good deal of money for the German Reparations Loan. Are the Kreuger interests now, as the writer quoted suggests, “unmanageably huge?” Huge they certainly are, but the Swedish financier is plainly out to increase them still further, and he seems to be a man who acts, in however wide a sphere, on calculation.