The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance

The majority of the previous reviews are excellent and I'm way late to the review party. A Chernow takes some considered reflection to review mainly in light of the massive size and scale of Chernow's efforts. Morgan was not my first Chernow read, but my last. Chernow has improved by nuance since writing Morgan and I anxiously await his upcoming US Grant biography. Chernow lets the reader determine opinion. Chernow states documented facts in a narrated timeline and seems to not render opinion or bias. If you're a conservative or liberal Chernow might seem to reinforce opinion. I have no idea whatsoever if Chernow is Dem or Repub and I hope he never reveals which. That's how good he is at biography.The first half of Morgan is spellbinding. This piddling enterprise that JP Sr nearly seems to `assume' for lack of heirs ... grows in a generation and a half through the synergism of genius among the god-like Morgan partners to become the US Department of State + Treasury, World Bank, IMF and FED but never gambled a dime in the stock market. The exclusivity and watch-maker precision of the Morgan partners in its hay day is simply not resident in modern common knowledge, I think. If not for politicians chasing extraordinary innovators, we might never have had a Great Depression. In the furious run-up to the stock-market carnival collapse, the politicians, not the cooler heads of Morgan prevailed in a populist extravaganza with a very bad ending for all but Morgan who never had a dime in that game. Morgan instead grew fabulously flush with cash as it picked up the ashes.The FDR Great Depression solution was insane in Morgan-think and if not for WW2, which the Morgan's tried mightily to avoid, there's no reason to believe the US could have ever emerged from the Depression. Only one Morgan partner imagined FDR's Keynes to have a lick of sense after he bankrupted Britain with magic. The mega-value of international bonds was Morgan's mega-wealth and it simply vanished in WW2 national debt repudiations and defaults. Morgan had to teach the newly empowered FDR Fed what to do. Morgan was relieved of the risk of the world and so that's how the US (and its taxpayers) came to be the banker to the world. Morgan was both figuratively and literally `murdered' by congressional witch hunters. This is a very unexpected end. Morgan should have been given the Medal of Honor equivalent for keeping the US solvent in WW2 and losing a fortune fighting a war they never wanted but later acceded as a human necessity.Morgan was the bastion of the global gold standard. The run-up to Bretton Woods is a fascinating econo-wonk trip from the gold standard perspective. Morgan had already been taken to the woodshed as Britain exited the gold standard and had to return to it in an earlier Keynesian guided calamity that might actually date the death of the British Empire and birth date US financial supremacy.It's here that I've spent time thinking Morgan through. Morgan was wrong. Bretton Woods created a wholly new thing called the $ institutionalized by the IMF, World Bank and Fed. The world agreed that paper was in every way 'gold'. The $ is observed to be 'gold' in spite of insane debt and commensurate notions of `risk'. Is it possible that the Fed can actually create money by printing? Global economic transaction efficiency seems to demand it. This of course makes no sense. Except that we also see the US interest rate plummet as the US rating falls. We see other `stronger' currencies like the Euro, Yen, and Yuan falter and none can effectively displace the $ at this moment. The $ will not be displaced until someone refuses to honor it and that just doesn't seem practicable as the global non-$ transaction cost is prohibitive.Chernow's Morgan should have ended just after this climactic-colossal game of fiat cash. The House of Morgan was an extreme meritocracy. After JP Jr, the Morgan lineage cannot cut the mustard. Morgan reinvents itself, struggles horribly in the new cut-throat competition of the `commodity' of regulated banking. There are merely interesting ups and downs as Morgan enters modern memory and Chernow becomes the victim of writers timing and never had the chance to see the super-new Morgan Stanley, et. al ... that by measure is far larger than it ever was (sans the diplomacy era) but that I suppose, is another story.The `modern Morgan' era ends in the 1980's and is the last half of the book and it is simply overcome by 22 years of events (the book was published in 1990). That's my take-away.

This book is a neat and ample history of JP Morgan - a once great economic family force. It has almost no applicability to dealing with today's JP Morgan Chase business atmosphere.

If there is one word to describe Ron Chernow's The House of Morgan, that word is "long". Seriously, the book could have been chopped into about 4 books. The idea of a Greek epic comes to mind, the Odyssey, one adventure after the other. It took me two months to digest it, Chernow's book. If there was one section that could have been significantly shortened, it is the section from the 1950s to the 1980s.But like the Odyssey, to Chernow's credit, he constantly ties the different eras of the House of Morgan together, around the culture of Pierpont Morgan. The House of Morgan stood for being the most upright, beyond criticism, and the highest quality and most powerful and loyal to their old time customers. And then we see how the offshoots of his original company stray, especially during the merger and leveraged buy out (LBO) mania of the 1980s.The weakness of the book is that in trying to cover 150 years of Morgan, it has to cover 150 years of the financial history of the United States as well as that of Europe, to some degree. Additionally, I found the rehashing of the go-go merger mania 1980s for the umteenth time uninteresting... but in the context of now knowing how the firm had gotten there, interesting. It seems like just yesterday Ivan Boesky and Michael Milliken were in the news.Interestingly, and it is very helpful to keep this in mind throughout the whole book, the book was written just after the financial crash on 1987. The book appears to be an attempt by Chernow to offer a context for how the 1987 crash occurred...greed. Many times he mentions how the US economy and many individual companies and people that worked at those companies were severely damaged by the leveraged buyouts that enriched the bankers, and impoverished everyone else. Chernow also makes clear that the financial shenanigans we still see today is just more of the same garbage that has been tolerated to everyone's detriment at least since the time of JP Morgan and almost certainly before.Curiously, at the time of his research, about 1988-1989, Chernow mentions in the credits section, both JP Morgan and Morgan Grenfell opened their firms' archives and personnel to the author, perhaps in an attempt to show how worthy their firms had been in the past and come clean of their recent behavior...yet Morgan Stanley totally shut the author out.

This is a very good book which deals with one of the most interesting periods of history: how the United States changed in the last 25 years of the XIX Century to become the industrial and financial centre of the world. It was the time of the "private bankers", of creation of fortunes, of yatchs and expeditions to Egypt, of houses with 140 rooms, of family dinasties, of bankers subject to "gentlemen codes", of names that became associated (forever) with money and power - Rockefeller, Vandebilt, Carnegie and, of course, Morgan.The first two thirds of the book tell the history of the Anglo-American bank and how power shifted slowly yet unstoppably from London to New York. It is the story of the two Morgans: Pierpont and his son Jack. This is by far the core of the book and the best of it. It is a fascinating story leading the reader through the days when the rules where made to cope with the progress and the accumulation of wealth. This is the time of the trains and steel industries, of buildings and investments of a size not conceived, let alone tried, only a mere two decades before. It was the classic age of capitalism and New York was its Athens.The last third of the book, roughly after the death of Jack Morgan and the end of WWII is far less interesting. The bank becomes only one more in an ocean of entities and the Directors are now mere plebeians who must compete fiercely for a piece of the market. The Guinness scandal in the 1980s is only a sad epitaph for an era long gone.The book's prose is very good and, even at 700 plus pages, it grasps us and doesn't seem that long. In some parts we want to get deeper. However, towards the end it is boring because we do not care anymore. The Morgans are gone and other names and people we neither know nor care step in. Then come the merges, the globalisation and another Century.The bank is still big, the aura is long gone. There's virtually nothing to tell.

The book was received with great anticipation the person had been after it for a long time and was very please worth the wait it ticked all the boxes.

This book is in my top 10 books ever read. It will most definitely remain in there, I cannot recommend this book enough. However, prepare yourself for a long read, it is very dense and slow to grasp. But all in all 10/10

This book has been very well researched . It is what it says on the title, all about the whole banking house of Morgan which today is Morgan Stanley banking. A good read.

This book is superb if you have any interest in financial history. A lot of what happened in the early 20th century mimics the howlers of banks during the crisis. Brilliantly written.