JP Morgan centennial

 John Pierpont (JP) Morgan died one hundred years ago, on March 31, 1913. He was the most important financier of his age and one of the greatest of all ages, along with Cosimo De' Medici, Mayer Amschel Rothschild and Siegmund Warburg. When the USA had no central bank, JP Morgan did the duties of one. He rescued the US government in two financial crises (in 1895 and 1907) by leading (even bullying) other banks into providing syndicated financing.  He founded or built up the forebears of many of the key financial players of our days: JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Guaranty, Morgan Grenfell (incorporated into Deutsche Bank), Morgan Stanley, spanning the whole world from commercial to private, from merchant to investment banking. He created many of the industrial luminaries of the twentieth century, including US Steel, International Harvester, General Electric, AT&T and most of the rail companies. He was an irascible man, a loner. He was obsessed with teosophy and the occult. He was a compulsive collector (of books, photos, paintings, clocks, gems and other art objects) and builder (in NYC he built the Metropolitan Club and the Morgan Library, among others). His famous photo  attempting to beat a photographer with his cane graces this blog.  He smoked over 20 large cigars a day and drank copiously, yet he died at 75.

At the end of his life he saw that the role he had performed could not be taken over by anyone else and that institutions were required.  Thus, he promoted the creation of a central banking system in the US in a famous secret meeting in 1910 of key bankers in a club on Jekyll Island, off the Georgia coast (this would result in the famous Aldrich Plan, named after Nelson Aldrich, a governor of Rhode Island who would be the grandfather of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller).  His delegate in this meeting was Benjamin Strong Jr, who would later become the first Governor the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, after the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act in December 23, 1913.

Although he wasn't a likeable man, his sense of public duty and his generosity with his money in the preservation of beauty (which led him to die a not-very-rich man by Rockefeller standards), as well as his creativity and leadership, makes him an important historical figure.