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His power was real, grounded in his unique role in channeling the ballooning trove of American savings. One way or another, through control of boards, investment partnerships, or just implicit understandings that a bank’s or an insurance company’s investment committee would follow Morgan’s lead, he and his partners disposed of perhaps 40 percent of
... See moreCharles R. Morris • The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy
AT&T’s savior was Theodore Vail, who became its president in 1907, just a few years after Millikan’s friend Frank Jewett joined the company.11 In appearance, Vail seemed almost a caricature of a Gilded Age executive: Rotund and jowly, with a white walrus mustache, round spectacles, and a sweep of silver hair, he carried forth a magisterial
... See moreJon Gertner • The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
Once, with its price per share at $295, the Panama Railroad was the highest listed stock on the New York Exchange. There had never been a railroad to compare with it.
David McCullough • Brave Companions
Henry Ford, then, took Rockefeller’s product as a commoditized input to fuel the growth of the auto industry!... See more
He took over potash and phosphorus manufacturing and choked off his competitors’ supplies.
Frank Partnoy • The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals
And its financial strength, quite simply, lay at the heart of the competitiveness of the newly completed transcontinental: it was tightly capitalized at low rates of interest. Although its land grant did not, generally speaking, extend beyond the western border of Minnesota, the GN also possessed other, more subtle advantages. The GN’s major
... See moreMichael P. Malone • James J. Hill: Empire Builder of the Northwest (The Oklahoma Western Biographies Book 12)
Morgan’s famous testimony to Congress that character came before money or property.
Frank Partnoy • The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals
All of this was a part of what Robert Reich has called “America’s first great merger boom,” which crested during the years 1898–1902. In that brief, four-year interval, over twenty-six hundred business mergers took place in the United States, involving assets worth more than $6.3 billion. This sharp trend toward monopoly, or at least oligopoly,
... See moreMichael P. Malone • James J. Hill: Empire Builder of the Northwest (The Oklahoma Western Biographies Book 12)
Thus prepared, after a frenzied holiday season, the foursome, along with their Saint Paul attorney R. B. Galusha, headed to New York early in January of the fateful year 1878 to meet with Kennedy and his associate Barnes. They found Kennedy eager to close a deal with his Dutch clients, for he genuinely believed this offer to be the best they were
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