JP Morgan is expected to lower its US economic growth forecast to 0.6% tomorrow.
THE HOUSE OF MORGAN
"I commend my soul to the bosom of my Savior," John Pierpont Morgan wrote in his will, "fully confident that, redeemed and purified by the sacrifice of His most precious blood, He will present it spotless before His heavenly Father, and without regard to personal sacrifices, the blessed doctrine of the complete REDEMPTION of sins through the blood once shed by Jesus Christ, and that alone."
And to the House of Morgan, represented by his son, he handed over,
upon his death in Rome in 1913,
CONTROL of the Morgan interests in New York, Paris, and London, four federal banks, three monopoly companies, three insurance companies, ten railroad lines, three streetcar companies, a postal company, the International Mercantile Marine,
powers,
by the principle of communicating vessels through the interconnection of boards of directors
over eighteen other railroads, over the US steel industry, over General Electric, over American telegraphs and telephones, over five major industries;
the intertwined cables of the Morgan-Stillman-Baker consortium held credit like a suspension bridge and controlled thirteen percent of the world's banking resources.
The first Morgan to found a financial syndicate was Joseph Morgan, a hotel owner in Hartford, Connecticut, who organized stagecoach runs and bought the stock of the Aetna insurance company when it was in tatters as a result of the panic caused by one of the great fires that ravaged New York in 1830
His son Junius followed in his footsteps, first in the dry goods business, then as a partner with George Peabody, a Massachusetts banker who built a huge insurance and mercantile emporium in London, where he became a friend of Queen Victoria.
ResponderExcluirJunius married the daughter of John Pierpont, a Boston preacher, poet, eccentric, and abolitionist. The eldest son of this marriage,
John Pierpont Morgan,
came to New York to make his fortune,
after being educated in England, attending the Lycée de Vevey, and proving himself an extraordinary mathematician at the University of Göttingen.
A languid and indolent twenty-year-old,
he was prepared for the Panic of 1857
(Wars, stock market panics, bankruptcies, war loans—all were favorable winds for the House of Morgan.)
ResponderExcluirWhen the cannons began to thunder at Fort Sumter, young Morgan made good money reselling defective muskets to the United States Army and began to make his presence felt in the Golden Room of the New York den; there was more to be gained in the gold business than in the musket business; the Civil War was not very profitable.
During the Franco-Prussian War, Junius Morgan placed the large foreign public debt bonds issued by the French Government of Tours on the American market.
At the same time, young Morgan was fighting against Jay Cooke and the German-Jewish bankers of Frankfurt who were trying to consolidate the American war debt (he had never liked either Germans or Jews).
The Panic of 1873 ruined Jay Cooker and made J. Pierpont Morgan the chief croupier of Wall Street; he partnered with the Philadelphia Drexels and built the Drexel Building, where for thirty years he sat enthroned in his mirrored office; there, ruddy and insolent, he wrote at his desk, smoking large black cigars; when important stakes were at stake, he hid in another, more intimate office, playing solitaire; he was famous for his economy of words: YES or NO, and for his way of blowing cigar smoke in the visitor's face and for his special arm gesture, as if to ask:
ResponderExcluir----- And what's in it for me (?) -----
In 1877, Junius Morgan retired; J. Pierpont was elected to the board of directors of the New York Central Railroad and launched the first "Corsair." He enjoyed water sports and the wonderful young actresses calling him "Commodore".
He founded the Stuyvesant Square maternity hospital and enjoyed attending Saint George's Church and singing a religious hymn to himself in the quiet evening.
ResponderExcluirIn the Panic of 1893,
with considerable personal benefit,
Morgan saved the United States' finances; the gold was draining away, the country was ruined, farmers were demanding a silver standard, Grover Cleveland and his cabinet paced the Blue Room of the White House, unable to reach a conclusion, speeches were being made in Congress while the gold reserves continued to melt away; the poor were starving; Coxey's army marched on Washington; Grover Cleveland hesitated long before summoning the representative of Wall Street's high finance; Morgan, sitting in his quarters at the Arlington Hotel, smoked cigars and calmly did his solitaire and crossword puzzles when the president summoned him;
he had a plan already prepared to stem the gold hemorrhage.
After that, Morgan's word was law; when Carnegie retired from business, Morgan built the Steel Monopoly.
ResponderExcluirJ. Pierpont Morgan was a bull-necked, irascible man with tiny magpie eyes and a hideous growth on his nose. He let his employees work themselves to death on routine banking tasks and sat in his office smoking black cigars. When faced with a decision, he would say YES or NO or simply turn away and continue solving the crossword.
At Christmas, his librarian invariably read him Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol from the original manuscript.
He loved canaries and small dogs and enjoyed taking young actresses out on his yacht. Each new Corsair was richer than the last.
When he dined with King Edward, he sat at His Majesty's right; he lunched tête-à-tête with the Kaiser; He enjoyed conversing with cardinals or the pope and never missed a conference of Episcopal bishops;
Rome was his favorite city.
He appreciated good food
He enjoyed old wines and beautiful women, and sailing on his yacht. From time to time, he would browse through his collections, lifting a jeweled snuffbox between his fingers and examining it with his piercing eyes.
ResponderExcluirHe organized a collection of autographs from the kings of France, and possessed glass chests filled with Babylonian tablets, seals, seals, statuettes, busts,
Gallo-Roman bronzes,
Merovingian jewelry, miniatures, clocks, tapestries, porcelain, cuneiform inscriptions, paintings by all the old masters—Dutch, Italian, Flemish, and Spanish—
manuscripts of the Gospels and the Apocalypse,
a collection of the works of Jean Jacques-Rousseau,
and letters by Pliny the Younger.
Their agents bought anything that was expensive or rare or bore the mark of an imperial past and, after examining the new acquisition with their magpie eyes, the precious thing was stored in a glass urn.
In the last year of his life, he sailed up the Nile in a dahabeeyah and gazed at the great columns of the Karnak temple for a long time.
ResponderExcluirThe panic of 1907 and the death of Harriman, his great adversary in the railroad business, in 1909 left him the undisputed master of Wall Street, undoubtedly the richest and most powerful private citizen in the world.
Old and weary of the imperial purple, suffering from gout, he deigned to go to Washington to answer the questions of the Pujo Commission, charged with investigating the financial operations of the major monopolies: "Yes, I did what seemed to me to be in the best interests of the country."
His empire was so well organized that when he died in 1913, there was virtually no commotion in world transactions; the imperial purple was placed on the shoulders of his son J.P. Morgan
educated at Groton and Harvard and in contact with the British ruling classes
to become a more constitutional monarch: '''J.P. Morgan suggests...
In 1917, the Allies owed the House of Morgan $1.9 billion; we crossed the sea to defend democracy and the flag;
ResponderExcluirand at the end of the Peace Conference, the phrase "J.P. Morgan suggests" had binding power over a seventy-four billion-dollar empire.
J.P. Morgan was a silent man, not at all given to public statements, but during the great steel strike he wrote to Gary:
"Warm congratulations on your defense of the principle of absolute freedom of direct hiring and firing of personnel, with which I, as you know, am in complete agreement." I believe that essential principles of American freedoms are at stake here, and if we stand firm, we will win.'' (J.P. Morgan)
(Wars and stock market panics,
shootings and fires,
bankruptcies, war loans,
famine, parasites, cholera, and typhus:
these fueled the growth of the House of Morgan.