Can Jamie Dimon Outdo J.P. Morgan Himself in This Panic?
Banking dynasty founder John Pierpont Morgan presided over a series of messy, improvised interventions that dragged on for weeks in the 1907 financial crisis.
John Pierpont Morgan, an influencer for the Gilded Age.
Source: Library of Congress/Corbis Historical
Last week, Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan Chase & Co., rode to the rescue of First Republic Bank as it faced a cataclysmic run on its deposits. Dimon and his allies at 10 other banks deposited $30 billion in the struggling institution, pledging to keep the money there for at least four months, if not longer.
Dimon’s intervention calls to mind a similar crisis many years ago, when John Pierpont Morgan helped quell the Panic of 1907. Almost everyone on Wall Street knows the story: Morgan summoned the nation’s top financiers to his palatial library and forced them to hammer out an accord that quelled the panic. The parallel is especially apt given that Dimon’s bank traces its ancestry to Morgan himself.