[I]n the period from 1925 to 1928, the Swedish match syndicate Svenska Tandsticks Aktiebolaget bought up four of the five match factories in Latvia. In 1928, Latvia signed an agreement with the Swedish match syndicate, which provided for the syndication of the Latvian match industry and the granting of an external loan to Latvia of 6 million US dollars.

— Viesturs P. Karnups, Latvian Foreign Trade with the Scandinavian Countries 1920–1940

Latvia employed her six–million–dollar loan for the purchase of seed–grain from abroad, for road building, land reclamation, loans to municipalities and landowners, and for railway construction. [In 1929, the year of Wall Street Crash.]

[Kreuger's] loan of six million dollars to Latvia antagonized the Moguls not only of New York, but of London as well. The City of Riga, jumping–off place for investigators of socialism and habitation of those newspaper correspondents whose papers will not allow them to tread upon Soviet soil, had been unethical enough to default on a loan. The Government of Latvia had assumed the blase attitude that Riga meant nothing to it and that Riga's obligations were most decidedly Riga's, not those of Latvia. The bankers were aroused. London financiers formally decided over their whisky–and–sodas that Latvia was no fit place for a gentleman's money and they asked New York bankers if they too would not, at least for technical purposes, also become gentlemen. The result was that Latvia became as completely blackballed by big–time finance as a freshman with high–water pants and a red necktie. Then along came the all–forgiving gentleman from Stockholm with those six million dollars. "Finance" never overlooked that transgression. After that Kreuger was most emphatically a lone wolf in the financial world, fair game for any one who was big and daring enough to tackle him.

[Loan] allowed the little Baltic country to laugh at the boycott which London and New York bankers had placed on her.

— William H. Stoneman, The life and death of Ivar Kreuger (1932)