Word: morganized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After selling his empire to J.P. Morgan in 1901 to form the centerpiece of the new behemoth, U.S. Steel, Carnegie devoted himself to good deeds. A prodigious philanthropist, he created 2,800 free libraries worldwide. "The man who dies rich dies disgraced," he declared bluntly. Like Rockefeller, Carnegie endowed large corporate foundations with elastic charters that took on an autonomous existence. At his death he had disbursed almost his entire $350 million fortune...
...Rockefeller and Carnegie built the industrial age, then Morgan (1837-1913) financed it. The most imposing personage ever to bestride Wall Street--his nickname was Jupiter--Morgan had a thunderclap voice, a ferocious glare and a grotesquely disfigured red nose that, he once ruefully joked, had become "part of the American business structure." Where Rockefeller and Carnegie endured hardscrabble boyhoods, Morgan came from a well-to-do Hartford, Conn., family, and his appetite for bosomy women, enormous yachts (his 300-ft. Corsair lent him a piratical image) and exquisite art was legendary...
After studying in 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...
Like Rockefeller, Morgan scorned competition as wasteful and ran afoul of federal trustbusters who broke up his railroad holding company, Northern Securities, in the early 1900s. The apex of Morgan's power came in 1901 with the creation of U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation. This was followed by International Harvester, the farm-equipment trust, and the International Mercantile Marine, the North Atlantic shipping cartel. In fact, Morgan presided over so many large-scale industrial consolidations that he recast the banker's role from that of handmaiden to master of industry...