Word: morgans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...surprise. He launched an antitrust suit that demanded the breakup of Northern Securities, a holding company organized to consolidate three railroads in the Pacific Northwest. By targeting that company, Roosevelt had also chosen to move against the man who epitomized the empire of money, New York financier J. Pierpont Morgan...
Beefy, saturnine and phenomenally wealthy, with a plump red nose caused by the skin disease rhinophyma, Morgan held immense power over the U.S. economy. In a day when there was no Federal Reserve to control the money supply or tweak interest rates, he operated at times as the nation's one-man central bank. By withdrawing his approval from a shaky deal, he could cause a panic. By pouring millions into tottering banks, he could end one. He did more than assemble capital for new ventures. He took over mismanaged companies, installed his own men and supervised operations...
Like Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, Morgan believed in free enterprise but had seen enough of unbridled competition. For much of his career, he had assembled financing for the railways whose stupendous growth had revolutionized the U.S. after the Civil War. Boom and bust, duplicated routes, desperate price cutting and collapsed enterprises--the bumpy realities of the railroad business left Morgan with a horror of economic disorder. Profits required stability. Stability required concentration. Concentration meant trusts...
...business affairs, Morgan was a man accustomed to handling things personally. One of his biggest objections to the way Roosevelt had sprung the Northern Securities suit was that the President had not quietly tipped him in advance. Large sums of borrowed money were at stake, and the abrupt attack by the Justice Department had rattled the markets. In Morgan style, he went personally to Washington to meet with Roosevelt and Attorney General Philander Knox...
Roosevelt left a recollection of the meeting, which remains a classic moment in the history of dealings between business and government. In that account, Morgan asks Roosevelt why he had not quietly allowed Morgan to take care of the problem without resorting to the courts...