J. P. Morgan & Co.

Morgan used finance to tame ruinous competition rather than to create. Morgan detested "bitter destructive competition that always led to demoralization and ruin" and brokered peace among private companies the way the Rothschilds and Barings did among states. He was the one regulator among the four tycoons, working to rein in the pace that Carnegie, Rockefeller and Gould drove.

Charles Morris casts him as the last of the great merchant bankers, doing what they had always done on a bigger canvas, not the pioneer of a new business form. His drive toward order and control left him appalled by the creative destruction of the post-Civil War boom.

Founders▶ 20:49

His leverage came from industries that needed outside capital. Morgan's power rested on railroads, which had an insatiable thirst for capital and were the first large investor-financed, publicly traded corporations. Oil and steel funded themselves, and Carnegie and Rockefeller guarded their independence from bankers by financing most growth internally.

By the speaker's recollection, railroads once made up about 80% of total stock market value.

Founders

Morgan was trained as a disciplinarian, not an inventor. Born wealthy, he was groomed for banking by his father Junius, spent school vacations in the bank's counting house, and at 28 in 1865 was learning the trade inside his father's banking network. His motto was "gentlemen pay their debts," and his nickname was Jupiter, for his gravitational pull on finance.

He had a flair for numbers, and his appetite for risk occasionally alarmed the more button-down Junius. He defined his career in reaction to the entrepreneurs; the speaker, after reading The House of Morgan, found Junius the more impressive man.

Founders▶ 20:49