Word: america
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Switzerland and Germany, the cosmopolitan young Morgan arrived on Wall Street in 1857, serving as agent for his father Junius Spencer Morgan, who had taken over a London merchant bank. Though Pierpont participated in refinancing the Civil War debt in the 1870s, he acquired true imperial status in underwriting America's railroads...
Morgan issued stocks and bonds for railroads (think of them as you would software companies today), brokered deals among them and dominated their boards. He recapitalized so many bankrupt railroads--Morganized them, as wits said--that by the 1890s he controlled one-sixth of America's railway system...
...lacked a central bank; Morgan stepped boldly, sometimes magnificently, into that breach. When gold reserves backing the country's legal tender dipped perilously low in 1895, he masterminded a bond issue in New York and London that replenished the gold stock--one of many acts he performed that preserved America's credit abroad and evinced a new financial maturity that won the confidence of foreign investors...
...that proved to be only the first smart move in a crusade that would make him the father of 20th century American industry. When the black Model T rolled out in 1908, it was hailed as America's Everyman car--elegant in its simplicity and a dream machine not just for engineers but for marketing men as well...
...company's assembly line alone threw America's Industrial Revolution into overdrive. Instead of having workers put together the entire car, Ford's cronies, who were great tool- and diemakers from Scotland, organized teams that added parts to each Model T as it moved down a line. By the time Ford's sprawling Highland Park plant was humming along in 1914, the world's first automatic conveyor belt could churn out a car every 93 minutes...