J.p. Morgan Quotes

The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.

Millionaires don't use Astrology, billionaires do.

A man always has two reasons for what he does--a good one, and the real one.

Do you honestly think Lenin is any different from J.P. Morgan? That you, if you were given absolute power, would behave any differently? Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?...Gods don't think they can become men.

Well, I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do.

Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you’ll be able to see farther.

A man has two reasons for doing something; a good reason and the real reason.

psilocybin was introduced to the West by a vice president of J. P. Morgan

Any board-room sitter with a taste for Wall Street lore has heard of the retort that J. P. Morgan the Elder is supposed to have made to a naïve acquaintance who had ventured to ask the great man what the market was going to do. “It will fluctuate,” replied Morgan dryly.

Perhaps J. P. Morgan did as a child have very severe feelings of inadequacy, perhaps his father did believe that he would not amount to anything; perhaps this did effect in him an inordinate drive for power for power’s sake. But all this would be quite irrelevant had he been living in a peasant village in India in 1890. If we would understand the very rich we must first understand the economic and political structure of the nation in which they become the very rich.

I milionari non vanno dagli astrologi, ma i miliardari sì.

After that, the men in the room rushed for the exits, apparently to sell their shares in Bear Stearns. By the time Alan Greenspan arrived to speak, there was hardly anyone who cared to hear what he had to say. The audience was gone. By Monday, Bear Stearns was of course gone, too, sold to J.P. Morgan for $2 a share.*

A civil servant can make rules that are friendly to an industry such as banking—and then go off to J.P. Morgan and recoup a multiple of the difference between his or her current salary and the market rate. (Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price.)

The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide you’re not going to stay where you are. —John Pierpont “J.P.” Morgan

Why must everybody like you? Who liked J. P. Morgan? Was he impressive? In a Turkish bath he’d look like a butcher. But with his pockets on he was very well liked.

If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it

Когда чистильщик обуви начинает интересоваться акциями, надо срочно уходить с рынка

He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of The New Yorker, “mildly unbalanced.” He did not like bankers, doctors, liquor, tobacco, idleness of any sort, pasteurized milk, Wall Street, overweight people, war, books or reading, J. P. Morgan and Co., capital punishment, tall buildings, college graduates, Roman Catholics, or Jews. Especially he didn’t like Jews. Once he hired a Hebraic scholar to translate the Talmud in a manner designed to make Jewish people appear shifty and avaricious.

A man sits in an office deciding what stocks to buy. He imagines, no doubt, that he is planning his purchases according to his own judgment. In actual fact his judgment is a melange of impressions stamped on his mind by outside influences which unconsciously control his thought. He buys a certain railroad stock because it was in the headlines yesterday and hence is the one which comes most prominently to his mind; because he has a pleasant recollection of a good dinner on one of its fast trains; because it has a liberal labor policy, a reputation for honesty; because he has been told that J. P. Morgan owns some of its shares.

J. P. Morgan once had a friend who was so worried about his stock holdings that he could not sleep at night. The friend asked, “What should I do about my stocks?” Morgan replied, “Sell down to the sleeping point.

A steady flow of loans from the leading banks on Wall Street, led by J.P. Morgan, had enabled the British, French, and Russians to purchase what they needed to sustain the war effort as their gold reserves dwindled from larger and larger war purchases.

I’m afraid J.P. Morgan and Company doesn’t lend to women,” he said amicably. “If you get married again, come see me. We’d be happy to lend the money to your husband.

J. P. Morgan tells the story of how he would get his shoes shined every Wednesday at the same shop around the corner from his office. One day the shoe shine attendant asked him if he and his friends could buy some stock through Morgan’s brokerage. The three friends had about $40—a lot of money in 1929. Morgan politely refused, hurried back to his office, and ordered that his company was not to have a single share of stock on its books by the end of the day. Morgan simply asked, “If the shoe shine boys are buying stocks, who else is left?” Of course, the 1929 stock market crash was only a few days away, and Morgan looked like a genius. He was not a genius; he noted that the order flow was likely running out on the buy side. It wasn’t his army of analysts that showed him that. It was a public investor.

You might think that as people get older, they spend money more freely out of the sheer desire to make the most of it before it’s truly too late. But the opposite tends to happen. In general, spending among American households declines as people age. For example, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that in 2017, average annual spending for households headed by 55-to-64-year-olds was $65,000; average spending fell to $55,000 for those between 65 and 74; and spending fell again to $42,000 for those 75 and older. This overall decline occurred despite a rise in healthcare expenses, because most other expenses, such as clothing and entertainment, were much lower. The decline in spending over time was even more acute for retirees with more than $1 million in assets, according to separate research conducted by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, which analyzed data from more than half a million of its customers.

And so, as the passengers drifted off to sleep to the rhythmic clicking of steel wheels against rail, little did they dream that, riding in the car at the end of their train, were six men who represented an estimated one-fourth of the total wealth of the entire world. This was the roster of the Aldrich car that night: Nelson W. Aldrich, Republican "whip" in the Senate, Chairman of the National Monetary Commission, business associate of J.P. Morgan, father-in-law to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; Abraham Piatt Andrew, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury; Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York, the most powerful of the banks at that time, representing William Rockefeller and the international investment banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Company; Henry P. Davison, senior partner of the J.P. Morgan Company; Benjamin Strong, head of J.P. Morgan's Bankers Trust Company;1 6. Paul M. Warburg, a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Company, a representative of the Rothschild banking dynasty in England and France, and brother to Max Warburg who was head of the Warburg banking consortium in Germany and the Netherlands.2

Eva and Anne Morgan, one a niece and the other a daughter of J. P. Morgan, the most powerful financier in U.S. history, used their family’s money to finance women workers who were protesting before and after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, even putting up a Fifth Avenue mansion as security for bail when those protesters were arrested. The

The word aristocrat itself was becoming almost a curse throughout the North, and travelers’ reports of the South’s pestilence-ridden, barefooted backwardness were staples of the northern press. It was implicitly understood, as one historian put it, that “two profoundly different and antagonistic civilizations . . . were competing for control of the political system.

Mussolini lacked one last guarantee of his survival: international legitimation and economic aid. In 1926, J. P. Morgan partner Thomas Lamont, another Fascist proselytizer, brokered a $100 million loan from the American government to the regime. Implicitly sanctioning Mussolini’s power grab, the act started a century of US support for right-wing authoritarian leaders.21

If Churchill had looked harder, he would have seen that England’s ‘highest position’ was very tenuous. Apart from her dead sons, the balance of events had swung heavily against her. Not least, his country was hugely in debt. By 1917, the British were paying most of the cost of the war not only for themselves but for their allies: half of Belgian and Serbian, two-thirds of French and Russian, and all of Italian war expenditure was funded by London. In return, London depended more and more on the money loaned by Washington and Wall Street, in particular the great bank of J.P. Morgan, and victory found the British in the excruciating position of having to repay the immense debts they owed, with little hope of recovering the debts owed them, or in the Russian case no hope at all.

To the untrained eye, the Wall Street people who rode from the Connecticut suburbs to Grand Central were an undifferentiated mass, but within that mass Danny noted many small and important distinctions. If they were on their BlackBerrys, they were probably hedge fund guys, checking their profits and losses in the Asian markets. If they slept on the train they were probably sell-side people—brokers, who had no skin in the game. Anyone carrying a briefcase or a bag was probably not employed on the sell side, as the only reason you’d carry a bag was to haul around brokerage research, and the brokers didn’t read their own reports—at least not in their spare time. Anyone carrying a copy of the New York Times was probably a lawyer or a back-office person or someone who worked in the financial markets without actually being in the markets. Their clothes told you a lot, too. The guys who ran money dressed as if they were going to a Yankees game. Their financial performance was supposed to be all that mattered about them, and so it caused suspicion if they dressed too well. If you saw a buy-side guy in a suit, it usually meant that he was in trouble, or scheduled to meet with someone who had given him money, or both. Beyond that, it was hard to tell much about a buy-side person from what he was wearing. The sell side, on the other hand, might as well have been wearing their business cards: The guy in the blazer and khakis was a broker at a second-tier firm; the guy in the three-thousand-dollar suit and the hair just so was an investment banker at J.P. Morgan or someplace like that. Danny could guess where people worked by where they sat on the train. The Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Merrill Lynch people, who were headed downtown, edged to the front—though when Danny thought about it, few Goldman people actually rode the train anymore. They all had private cars. Hedge fund guys such as himself worked uptown and so exited Grand Central to the north, where taxis appeared haphazardly and out of nowhere to meet them, like farm trout rising to corn kernels. The Lehman and Bear Stearns people used to head for the same exit as he did, but they were done. One reason why, on September 18, 2008, there weren’t nearly as many people on the northeast corner of Forty-seventh Street and Madison Avenue at 6:40 in the morning as there had been on September 18, 2007.

In many of these subsidy programs, no jobs are created. Instead the state income taxes are given to companies that agree to move jobs from one state across the border to another, as AMC Theatres agreed to do in moving its headquarters from Kansas City, Missouri, to Leawood, Kansas, just ten miles away. AMC will get to pocket $47 million withheld from its workers, a boon to its major owners: J. P. Morgan, Apollo Management, the Carlyle Group and the firm Mitt Romney cofounded in 1984, Bain Capital Management.

munitions exports, which stood at just $40 million in 1914, boomed to nearly $1.3 billion in 1916, while the total value for exported manufactured goods rose from $2.4 billion (or 6 percent of the gross national product) in 1914 to $5.5 billion (or 12 percent of GNP) in 1916, almost exclusively because of increased trade with the Allies. While J. P. Morgan, which brokered most of the transactions, led a long list of American firms that reaped enormous profits from this trade, millions of ordinary Americans, from workers to farmers, benefited as well.

Modern electrical power distribution technology is largely the fruit of the labors of two men—Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Compared with Edison, Tesla is relatively unknown, yet he invented the alternating electric current generation and distribution system that supplanted Edison's direct current technology and that is the system currently in use today. Tesla also had a vision of delivering electricity to the world that was revolutionary and unique. If his research had come to fruition, the technological landscape would be entirely different than it is today. Power lines and the insulated towers that carry them over thousands of country and city miles would not distract our view. Tesla believed that by using the electrical potential of the Earth, it would be possible to transmit electricity through the Earth and the atmosphere without using wires. With suitable receiving devices, the electricity could be used in remote parts of the planet. Along with the transmission of electricity, Tesla proposed a system of global communication, following an inspired realization that, to electricity, the Earth was nothing more than a small, round metal ball. [...] With $150,000 in financial support from J. Pierpont Morgan and other backers, Tesla built a radio transmission tower at Wardenclyffe, Long Island, that promised—along with other less widely popular benefits—to provide communication to people in the far corners of the world who needed no more than a handheld receiver to utilize it. In 1900, Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi successfully transmitted the letter "S" from Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland and precluded Tesla's dream of commercial success for transatlantic communication. Because Marconi's equipment was less costly than Tesla's Wardenclyffe tower facility, J. P. Morgan withdrew his support. Moreover, Morgan was not impressed with Tesla's pleas for continuing the research on the wireless transmission of electrical power. Perhaps he and other investors withdrew their support because they were already reaping financial returns from those power systems both in place and under development. After all, it would not have been possible to put a meter on Tesla's technology—so any investor could not charge for the electricity!

Estando en Hong Kong en 2009, me enteré de que la ciudad de Shanghai acababa de adoptar nuevos libros de texto escolares de historia que resaltan figuras como J. P. Morgan y Bill Gates, instituciones como el mercado de valores de Wall Street y adelantos tecnológicos como el viaje a la Luna o el tren bala de Japón. En lugar de estar enfocados en guerras o conflictos ideológicos del pasado, los nuevos libros de texto de la China comunista enfatizan el crecimiento económico, la innovación y la globalización.

The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide you’re not going to stay where you are. —John Pierpont “J.P.” Morgan It

Rockefeller “The most important thing for a young man is to establish a credit — a reputation,

J. P. Morgan had started before the war, as the son of a banker who began selling stocks for the railroads for good commissions. During the Civil War he bought five thousand rifles for $3.50 each from an army arsenal, and sold them to a general in the field for $22 each. The rifles were defective and would shoot off the thumbs of the soldiers using them. A congressional committee noted this in the small print of an obscure report, but a federal judge upheld the deal as the fulfillment of a valid legal contract.

Another recollection of Duveen’s was of being taken by his father to see the elder J. P. Morgan in his London house, at Prince’s Gate. His Uncle Henry, who had by then become a pet of Morgan’s, had told Morgan that his brother was, next to him, the highest authority on Chinese porcelains.

Mr. J.P. he’s such a sweetie underneath the sternness,

For 1863, the same year that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation asserted the liberty of slaves, the twenty-eight-year-old Carnegie reported a personal wartime income of $42,260.67; this dwarfed by many multiples the amount he still earned as an official employee of the railroad. Of course, there was a fundamental mechanism that allowed such pursuit of personal gain during inestimable bloodshed. The Union Army allowed wealthier men who were drafted to pay $300 for a substitute to fight in their place. This had even boiled over into a dramatic bit of class warfare with the Draft Riots in New York City, where “$300 man” was the invective used by the have-nots in occasionally accosting the haves. One $300 man, J. P. Morgan, the son of America’s top banker in London, noted in his account book that he had spent about the same amount on cigars in 1863.

By 1900, the nation’s railroads were consolidated into six huge systems controlled by Wall Street bankers, principally J. P. Morgan

the two J. P. Morgans even walked and talked alike.

J.P. Morgan created artificial panic used as excuse to pass Federal Reserve Act. Morgan was instrumental in pushing U. S. into WWI to protect his loans to British government. He financed Socialist groups to create an all-powerful centralized government which international bankers would control at the apex from behind the scenes. After his death, his partners helped finance the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

These were the men who, during the “Middle Ages of American industry,” the half century of unbridled industrial expansion following the Civil War, had harnessed America’s vast mineral resources and tapped its long-stored capital to create needed industrial growth but who, to turn that growth into personal wealth, had stationed themselves at the “narrows” of production, the key points of production and distribution, and exacted tribute from the nation. They were the men who had blackmailed state legislatures and city councils by threatening to build their railroad lines elsewhere unless they received tax exemptions, outright gifts of cash—and land grants so vast that, by 1920, the elected representatives of America had turned over to the railroad barons an area the size of Texas. They were the men who had bribed and corrupted legislators—the Standard Oil Company, one historian said, did everything possible to the Pennsylvania Legislature except refine it—to let them loot the nation’s oil and ore, the men who, building their empires on the toil of millions of immigrant laborers, had kept wages low, hours long, and had crushed the unions. Their creed was summed up in two quotes: Commodore Vanderbilt’s “Law? What do I care for law? Hain’t I got the power?” and J. P. Morgan’s “I owe the public nothing.

Instead of being described in the investment banking section, J.P. Morgan could as easily have been included in this section, as the last of the Dinosaurs, and perhaps the greatest and most powerful of them all.

J.P. Morgan learned to fish in troubled waters.

Presently the Rothschilds control, among other things; Shell, BP, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, ABN Amro, Fortis, Unilever, IBM, World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund, ING, Federal Reserve, Bank of England, Arrow Fund Curacao, J.P Morgan and many other banks and influential organizations. The participation of the Rothschild dynasty in various competitive companies misleads even experts. A perfect example of this is when Henry Coston elaborately described the all out struggle between American Standard Oil (of the Rockefeller family) and British Royal Dutch-Shell for market leadership in 1920s France.[17] The struggle for control lasted into the late Fifties.[18] However, he essentially overlooked one important detail; that both oil giants belonged to the Rothschilds! Coston failed to understand that this sham of a fight served only one purpose: to bring in enormous profits while covering up the real power behind it.[19]

Back in 1933, during the height of the populist backlash against Wall Street, the son of J. Pierpont Morgan—J. P. “Jack” Morgan, Jr.—had been grilled by Congress about his ethos. He declared that the aim of his bank was to conduct “first-class business…in a first-class way.” Fifty years later, that mantra of Jack Morgan struck much of the banking world as quaint. Years of bold innovation had made high-risk trading and aggressive deal making the gold standard of the street, and a “kill or be killed” ethic prevailed. At

Senator LaFollette publicly charged that a money trust of fifty men controlled the United States. George F. Baker, partner of J.P. Morgan, on being queried by reporters as to the truth of the charge, replied that it was absolutely in error. He said that he knew from personal knowledge that not more than eight men ran this country.

Oddly, the United States came rather late into the picture. It was only in 1913, thanks to the efforts of J. P. Morgan, that it got its own central bank, and called it the Federal Reserve Board or the Fed. The Fed would be the ‘lender of last resort’—to save greedy banks which had gone bust—something that happened all too often then.

J. P. Morgan once said, “If you want something too much, you will not succeed in getting it.

James Pierpont, one of the founders of Yale University.

MARKET—the daytime adventure serial of the well-to-do—would not be the stock market if it did not have its ups and downs. Any board-room sitter with a taste for Wall Street lore has heard of the retort that J. P. Morgan the Elder is supposed to have made to a naïve acquaintance who had ventured

Investors should avoid any urge to forecast the stock market. Forecasts, even forecasts by recognized “experts,” are unlikely to be better than random guesses. “It will fluctuate,” declared J. P. Morgan when asked about his expectation for the stock market. He was right. All other market forecasts—usually estimating the overall direction of the stock market—are historically about 50 percent right and 50 percent wrong. You wouldn’t bet much money on a coin toss, so don’t even think of acting on stock market forecasts.

than any

There is not8 in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune,” Roosevelt wrote in a magazine article in 1895. “These men are equally careless of the workingmen, whom they oppress, and of the State, whose existence they imperil.” As

No man is above [the law] and no man is below it. The crime of cunning, the crime of greed, the crime of violence, are all equally crimes … This is a government of the people; including alike the people of great wealth and of moderate wealth, the people who employ others, the people who are employed, the wage-worker, the lawyer, the mechanic, the banker, the farmer.” On a return visit to Butte, Montana, he said: “I have the right to challenge the support of all good citizens and to demand the acquiescence of every good man. I hope I will have it; but once for all I wish it understood that even if I do not have it I shall enforce the law.” He spoke to members of various unions that day but his real audience was in New York. Roosevelt told Lodge he had been inspired by the “knock down and dragout fight with Hanna and the whole Wall Street

in 1892 the fever for Vermeers had just begun to spike. Soon every millionaire worth knowing had thrown his checkbook into the ring. In 1900, Collis P. Huntington, the railroad tycoon, bequeathed Vermeer’s Woman Playing a Lute to the Met. In 1901, it was Henry Frick’s turn to buy, though the steel magnate kept his Vermeer for himself. This was Girl Interrupted at Her Music, which can be seen at the Frick today. In 1907, J. P. Morgan got in on the game. Morgan collected art and other valuables on the grandest scale—Rembrandt, Hals, Van Dyck, among countless others—and at such a pace that sometimes he himself lost track.

Vanderbilt was also a member of what a Minnesota newspaper called the “Just Missed It” club, a fortunate group whose roster included Theodore Dreiser, Guglielmo Marconi, and J. P. Morgan, all of whom had planned to sail on the Titanic but for one reason or another had changed their minds.

Although the Honduran debt would mostly go unpaid, Zemurray had achieved a remarkable personal victory. He had outmaneuvered Knox, successfully defied the US government, poked J. P. Morgan in the eye, and ended up a much wealthier man. In engineering the “invasion,” he had covered his tracks so well that contemporary investigations into the scheme were never able to connect him to it or prove he broke any laws. But he had also intentionally overthrown a government to achieve his own financial ends.

The James Hills and J.P. Morgans are an affront to a society dedicated to the worship of mediocrity.

The CDOs that sliced up and then spliced together disparate debts belonging to a heterogeneous multitude of families and businesses were put together on the basis of certain formulae, whose purpose was, supposedly, to calculate their value and their riskiness. These formulae were developed by financial engineers working for Wall Street (e.g. for J. P. Morgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, etc.). To render the formulae solvable, certain assumptions had to be made. First and foremost was the assumption that the probability that one slice of debt within a CDO would go bad was largely unrelated to the probability of a similar default by the other slices in the same CDO. That is, it was assumed that what happened in 2007–08 was…impossible! That it was unnecessary to factor in the possibility of some crisis, during which Bob lost his house for reasons that increased the chances that Jane would lose her job and eventually also default on her mortgage.

But “Dennis” was also seven years older than himself, which made him almost forty in spirit. That is why, no doubt, he was already a vice president at J.P. Morgan & Sons & Co.

His assessments in many cases were one step ahead of those of J. P. Morgan’s men, who often swooped in right after Rask, driving the stock up. In fact, in the midst of the storm, he received a note from Morgan, mentioning his father (“Solomon’s were the finest maduros I ever had the pleasure to smoke”) and inviting him to confer with some of his most trusted people at his library,

The greatness of Zemurray lies in the fact that he never lost faith in his ability to salvage a situation. Bad things happened to him as bad things happen to everyone, but unlike so many he was never tempted by failure. He never felt powerless or trapped. He was, as I said, an optimist. He stood in constant defiance. When the secretary of state teamed up with J. P. Morgan and the Honduran government in a way contrary to Zemurray’s interests, he simply changed the Honduran government. When United Fruit drew a line at the Utila River and said, “You shall not cross,” he crossed anyway. When he was forbidden to build a bridge, he built a bridge but called it something else.

I don’t think you can be careful enough, Belle. You’re working for J. P. Morgan. Some people say he’s one of the smartest men in the country. I don’t know about that, but I know he’s one of the most ruthless. What would happen if he finds out that you’re colored?

Rockefellers and other Wall Street capitalists such as Jacob Schiff, Elihu Root, J. P. Morgan, and the Harriman family

In 1900, George and Clara Morris and their four children, Samuel, Selma, Marcella, and Malvina, left Bucharest, Romania, and boarded a ship for New York City. When they arrived in the United States, they stayed in New York City for a few weeks and then decided to move to Los Angeles, where George wanted to become a director in the movie business. Along the way, in St. Louis, Clara had another baby and died in childbirth. George put the children in an orphanage there before heading on to Los Angeles, where he promised to send for them. The children stayed in the orphanage until the oldest child, Marcella, was able to make enough money to get them all out. She moved them back to New York City, where she became the first Jewish female to hold a seat on the Wall Street stock exchange, where she made millions of dollars that she later gave to Brandeis University. She lived with her sisters in an apartment on Charles Street in Greenwich Village and had a house in Southampton, New York, and somewhere along the way had an affair with J. P. Morgan. Interesting? You bet. But don’t worry about remembering any of this, because it’s 90 percent wrong, which I didn’t find out until years later.

The object of so tying up these securities is that J.P. Morgan & Co. may be assured of the control of the business for a given period of years,

Wasson era un banquero de J. P. Morgan convertido en cazador de hongos aficionado

As a wholesale bank, J. P. Morgan and Company would take deposits only from important clients—large corporations, other banks, foreign governments. Like other private New York banks, it rejected deposits from the general public and accepted money only from wealthy people with proper introductions. It paid no interest on deposits of less than $7,500 and held no deposit of less than $1,000.

seeing that most of the Jews in this country are thoroughly pro-German, and a very large number of them are anti-J. P. Morgan & Co.,

one reason why J. P. Morgan and Company had an enormous head start with foreign clients.

Only the prestigious Wall Street firms such as J. P. Morgan and Company or Kuhn, Loeb could tap the foreign and domestic capital needed to execute these transactions.

I have come to the conclusion that the chief reason of the dislike that exists in Washington for J.P. Morgan & Co. . . . originates in the fact that we ask for no favors, that the Democratic party has tried its best to cripple us in every way it could,

National City became known as the oil bank, much as J. P. Morgan and Company would be called the steel bank.

At the beginning of the 1910s, the American banker J. P. Morgan estimated that the capitalist system could not function if the difference between the salaries of the directors and the workers went beyond a factor of 30 or 40. It is presently above 1,000! The 20 percent best-off Americans contribute half of consumer spending. The remaining 80 percent are quickly becoming impoverished, falling into spiraling debt that has entirely removed them from the cycle of investment and savings

In 2009 Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, claimed that ‘The people of Goldman Sachs are among the most productive in the world.’3 Yet, just the year before, Goldman had been a major contributor to the worst financial and economic crisis since the 1930s. US taxpayers had to stump up $125 billion to bail it out. In light of the terrible performance of the investment bank just a year before, such a bullish statement by the CEO was extraordinary. The bank laid off 3,000 employees between November 2007 and December 2009, and profits plunged.4 The bank and some its competitors were fined, although the amounts were small relative to later profits: fines of $550 million for Goldman and $297 million for J. P. Morgan, for example.5 Despite everything, Goldman–along with other banks and hedge funds–proceeded to bet against the very instruments which they had created and which had led to such turmoil.

GE melded Thomas Edison’s workbench with J. P. Morgan’s financial might to create a juggernaut that, in powering the nation’s middle class, its military might, and its explosion of financial wealth, marched in step with the rise of modern America.

Questionable investment deals certainly contributed to a number of municipal financial crises that occurred after the 2008 stock market crash. Jefferson County, Alabama, for example, entered into interest rate swaps that helped swell its debt burden to $3 billion when interest rates collapsed. The county sued the lead underwriter, J.P. Morgan, on the grounds that it misled the county and investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission also imposed significant penalties on the underwriter in 2009. Detroit similarly entered swaps that the bankruptcy court ultimately settled for much less than their face value after the bankruptcy judge raised significant questions about the swaps' legality and enforceability.

In his book The Prime Movers,1 psychologist Edwin Locke identifies the core mental traits of great business leaders—Steve Jobs, Sam Walton, Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Walt Disney, and J. P. Morgan, to name only a few. While a number of variables contributed to their success, Locke found one key trait they all shared: vision.

This line of defense is still at the core of today’s tax-dodging industry. But it was wrong when J. P. Morgan advanced it and it is wrong now. Why? Because the law of the United States—like that of most other countries—contains a set of provisions, known as the economic substance doctrine, that make illegal any transaction that has no other purpose than a reduction of tax liability.

A man approached J. P. Morgan, held up an envelope, and said, “Sir, in my hand I hold a guaranteed formula for success, which I will gladly sell you for $25,000.” “Sir,” J. P. Morgan replied, “I do not know what is in the envelope; however, if you show me, and I like it, I give you my word as a gentleman that I will pay you what you ask.” The man agreed to the terms and handed over the envelope. J. P. Morgan opened it and extracted a single sheet of paper. He gave it one look, a mere glance, then handed the piece of paper back to the gent. And paid him the agreed-upon $25,000. On the paper… 1. Every morning, write a list of the things that need to be done that day. 2. Do them.

The article caught the attention of J.P. Morgan, who called on Tesla. Tesla met with Morgan and explained that he

The article caught the attention of J.P. Morgan, who called on Tesla. Tesla met with Morgan and explained that

Morgan began to speak. He demanded52 to know why Roosevelt hadn’t warned him. “This is just what we did not want to do,” said Roosevelt. “If we have done anything wrong,” Morgan replied, “send your man to my man and they can fix it up.” “That can’t be done.” “We don’t want to fix it up,” Knox interjected. “We want to stop it.” “Are you going to attack my other interests, the Steel Trust and the others?

How big and important are proprietary trading and principal investing activities at Goldman? Glenn Schorr, a Nomura Securities equity research analyst covering Goldman stock, estimated that the Volcker Rule, which is intended to restrict proprietary trading and principal investing at investment banks, would impact 48 percent of Goldman’s total consolidated revenue. To put this into context, he estimated the impact at 27 percent, 9 percent, and 8 percent of total consolidated revenues of Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan, respectively.

He was a slow learner but patient and persistent and, like J. P. Morgan and Jay Gould, exhibited a terrific head for math.

J. P. Morgan was credited with ending the crash of 1907 by, along with other remedial action, asking the clergy of New York City to preach sermons of encouragement.

By freeing talent to convert ideas into products, and by marrying unconventional experiments with hard commercial targets, this distinctive form of finance fostered the business culture that made the Valley so fertile. In an earlier era, J. P. Morgan’s brand of finance fashioned American business into muscular oligopolies; in the 1980s, Michael Milken’s junk bonds fueled a burst of corporate takeovers and slash-and-burn cost cuts. In similar fashion, venture capital has stamped its mark on an industrial culture, making Silicon Valley the most durably productive crucible of applied science anywhere, ever. Thanks to venture capital, the Traitorous Eight were able to abandon William Shockley, launch Fairchild Semiconductor, and set this miracle in motion. By 2014, an astonishing 70 percent of the publicly traded tech companies in the Valley could trace their lineage to Fairchild.[12]

By freeing talent to convert ideas into products, and by marrying unconventional experiments with hard commercial targets, this distinctive form of finance fostered the business culture that made the Valley so fertile. In an earlier era, J. P. Morgan’s brand of finance fashioned American business into muscular oligopolies; in the 1980s, Michael Milken’s junk bonds fueled a burst of corporate takeovers and slash-and-burn cost cuts. In similar fashion, venture capital has stamped its mark on an industrial culture, making Silicon Valley the most durably productive crucible of applied science anywhere, ever.

The bank’s American presidents stood at the center of the network of connections between Wall Street and American industry and Nazi Germany. Standard Oil had formed a cartel with IG Farben, whose CEO, Hermann Schmitz, sat on the board of the BIS. The French subsidiary of J. P. Morgan, a founding member of the BIS, traded profitably with the Nazis after the invasion of France. ITT had gone into partnership with Kurt von Schröder, the powerful Nazi banker who was a director of the BIS. For the new class of transnational financiers, war was merely an interruption in commerce, albeit a highly profitable one.

In 1901 J. P. Morgan created the largest company of all, U.S. Steel, merging Andrew Carnegie’s empire with several other steel companies to form a new company capitalized at $1.4 billion. The revenues of the federal government that year were a mere $586 million. The sheer size of the enterprise stunned the world. Even the Wall Street Journal confessed to “uneasiness over the magnitude of the affair,” and wondered if the new corporation would mark “the high tide of industrial capitalism.” A joke made the rounds where a teacher asks a little boy about who made the world. “God made the world in 4004 B.C.,” he replied, “and it was reorganized in 1901 by J. P. Morgan.

I told you I’ve been a student of deals. And deals guys. I’ve read just about everything on James J. Hill, Harold Milner, Carl Icahn, Sam Zell, even J.P. Morgan and Jimmy Walker.” “What about Donald Trump?” “A comb-over windbag who licenses his name to real developers. Are you kidding?

Before long the greatest expansion of business in the history of the Street was under way and Wall Street quickly blossomed into the second largest securities market on earth, second only to London. Fortunes were made in the next few years. In 1864 J. P. Morgan, only twenty-seven years old, had a taxable income of $53,287, fifty times what a skilled worker might expect to earn in a year. So busy were the brokers that the lunch counter was invented to afford them a quicker meal than could be had by going home. Fast food is, perhaps, not the least of the country’s legacies from the Civil War.

But Glass-Steagall also greatly weakened the largest and strongest banks by forcing those that had both a deposit and an investment business to choose one or the other. J. P. Morgan and Company, for instance, remained a depository bank and spun off Morgan, Stanley, and Company.

But two of Edison’s greatest inventions are seldom mentioned because, by their nature, they couldn’t be patented. One was perhaps his greatest invention of all, the industrial research laboratory. Edison established his own laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876, and it was there that he created the phonograph (1877), the electric light (1879), and hundreds of other inventions. It was, in essence, an invention factory where engineers, chemists, and mechanics turned new technological possibilities into practical—and, most important, commercially viable—products. When General Electric was formed in 1892 by J. P. Morgan from the Edison General Electric Company and its major competitor, Thomson-Houston Electric Company, the new company almost immediately established a laboratory of its own at its headquarters in Schenectady, New York. It quickly became the model for a number of other corporate research labs that in the twentieth century would turn out an unending stream of inventions and practical applications of new technology. The list of the fruits of Edison’s seminal idea to industrialize the process of invention—to industrialize Yankee ingenuity—is nearly endless: cellophane, nylon, synthetic rubber, transistors, Teflon, and the microprocessor being but a few of the more important. In 2003 IBM alone would take out more than thirty-four hundred patents.