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J.P. Morgan & Co.
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J.P. Morgan & Co. was a commercial and investment banking institution based in the United States founded by J. Pierpont Morgan and commonly known as the House of Morgan or simply Morgan.
The firm is the direct predecessor of two of the largest banking institutions in the United States and globally, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley.
In 2000, J.P. Morgan was acquired by Chase Manhattan Bank to form JPMorgan Chase & Co., one of the largest global banking institutions.
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Encyclopedia
J.P. Morgan & Co. was a commercial and investment banking institution based in the United States founded by J. Pierpont Morgan and commonly known as the House of Morgan or simply Morgan.
The firm is the direct predecessor of two of the largest banking institutions in the United States and globally, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley.
In 2000, J.P. Morgan was acquired by Chase Manhattan Bank to form JPMorgan Chase & Co., one of the largest global banking institutions. Today, the J.P. Morgan brand is used to market certain JPMorgan Chase wholesale businesses, including investment banking, commercial banking and asset management. The J.P. Morgan branding was revamped in 2008 to return to its more traditional appearance after several years of depicting the "Chase symbol to the right of a condensed and modernized "JPMorgan".
Between 1959 and 1989, J.P. Morgan operated as the Morgan Guaranty Trust, following its merger with the Guaranty Trust Company.
History
Early History
The origins of the firm date back to 1854 when Junius S. Morgan joined a London-based banking business headed by George Peabody. Over the next ten years, Junius took control of George Peabody & Co., changing the name to J.S. Morgan & Co. Junius's son, J. Pierpont Morgan, came to work with his father and would later found what would later become J.P. Morgan & Co.
J.P. Morgan & Co., was founded in New York in 1871 as Drexel, Morgan & Co. by J. Pierpont Morgan and Philadelphia banker Anthony J. Drexel. The new merchant banking partnership served initially as an agent for Europeans investing in the United States.
The House of Morgan
In 1895, Drexel, Morgan & Co. became J.P. Morgan & Co. (see also: John Pierpont Morgan). It financed the formation of the United States Steel Corporation, which took over the business of Andrew Carnegie and others and was the world's first billion-dollar corporation. In 1895, it supplied the United States government with $62 million in gold to float a bond issue and restore the treasury surplus of $100 million. In 1892, the company began to finance the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad and led it through a series of acquisitions that made it the dominant railroad transporter in New England.
Built in 1914, 23 Wall Street was known as "The Corner" and "The House of Morgan," and for decades the bank's headquarters was the most important address in American finance. At noon, on September 161920, an anarchist bomb exploded in front of the bank, killing 38 and injuring 400. Shortly before the bomb went off, an unknown person placed a warning note in a mailbox at the corner of Cedar Street and Broadway. The warning read: "Remember we will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you. American Anarchists Fighters." While theories abound about who was behind the Wall Street bombing and why they did it, after twenty years of investigation the FBI rendered the file inactive in 1940 without ever finding the perpetrators.
In August 1914, Henry P. Davison, a Morgan partner, traveled to the UK and made a deal with the Bank of England to make J.P. Morgan & Co. the monopoly underwriter of war bonds for UK and France. The Bank of England became a "fiscal agent" of J.P. Morgan & Co. and vice versa. The company also invested in the suppliers of war equipment to Britain and France. Thus, the company profited from the financing and purchasing activities of the two European governments.
During the early 1920s, J.P. Morgan & Co. was active in promoting banks in the Southern Hemisphere, including the Bank of Central and South America.
Glass-Steagall and Morgan Stanley
In 1933, the provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act forced J.P. Morgan & Co. to separate its investment banking from its commercial banking operations. J.P. Morgan & Co. chose to operate as a commercial bank, because after the stock market crash of 1929, investment banking was in some disrepute and commercial lending was perceived to be more the profitable and prestigious business. Additionally, many within J.P. Morgan believed that a change in the political climate would allow the company to resume its securities businesses but that it would be nearly impossible to reconstitute the bank if it were disassembled.
In 1935, after being barred from securities business for over a year, the heads of J.P. Morgan made the decision to spin off its investment banking operations. Two J.P. Morgan partners, Henry S. Morgan (son of Jack Morgan and grandson of J. Pierpont Morgan) and Harold Stanley, founded Morgan Stanley on September 16, 1935 with $6.6 million of nonvoting preferred stock from J.P. Morgan partners. At the beginning, Morgan Stanley's headquarters were at 2 Wall Street, just down the street from J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley bankers routinely used 23 Wall Street when closing transactions.
Morgan Guaranty Trust
In the years following the spin-off of Morgan Stanley, the securities business proved robust, while the parent firm, which incorporated in 1940, was little sleepy. By the 1950s J.P. Morgan was only a mid-size bank. In order to bolster its position, in 1959, J.P. Morgan merged with the Guaranty Trust Company of New York to form the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company. The two banks already had numerous relationships between them and had complementary characteristics as J.P. Morgan brought a prestigious name and high quality clients and bankers while Guaranty Trust brought a significant amount of capital. Although Guaranty Trust was nearly four times the size of J.P. Morgan at the time of the merger in 1959, legacy J.P. Morgan employees were the primary managers of the newly-formed Morgan Guaranty and J.P. Morgan was considered the buyer.
Return of J.P. Morgan & Co.
Although ten years after the merger, Morgan Guaranty would establish a bank holding company called J.P. Morgan & Co. Incorporated, it would continue to operate as Morgan Guaranty through the 1980s before beginning to migrate back toward the use of the J.P. Morgan brand. In 1988, the company once again began operating exclusively as J.P. Morgan & Co.
Also, in the 1980s, J.P. Morgan along with other commercial banks pushed the envelope of product offerings toward investment banking, beginning with the issuance of commercial paper. In 1989, the Federal Reserve permitted J.P. Morgan to be the first commercial bank to underwrite a corporate debt offering In the 1990s, J.P. Morgan moved quickly to rebuild its investment banking operations and by the late 1990s would emerge as a top-five player in securities underwriting.
JPMorgan Chase
By the late 1990s, J.P. Morgan had emerged as a large but not dominant commercial and investment banking franchise with an attractive brand name and a strong presence in debt and equity securities underwriting. Beginning in 1998, J.P. Morgan openly discussed the possibility of a merger and speculation of a pairing with banks including Goldman Sachs, Chase Manhattan Bank, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank AG were prevalent. In 2000, Chase Manhattan Bank, which had emerged as one of the largest and fastest growing commercial banks in the United States through a series of mergers over the previous decade, was looking for yet another transformational merger to improve its position in investment banking.
On September 13, 2000, Chase Manhattan Bank announced the acquisition of J.P. Morgan & Co. for $30.9 billion.
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, passed just a year earlier, repealed the restrictions of Glass-Steagall and allowed consolidation of investment banking and commercial banking operations allowing for the merger of J.P. Morgan and Chase as well as the purchase of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette by Credit Suisse earlier in 2000.
The combined JPMorgan Chase would become one of the largest banks both in the United States and globally offering a full complement of investment banking, commercial banking, retail banking, asset management, private banking and private equity businesses.
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