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Morgan Guaranty by the custom services and ingenuity in solving financial problems that have become the firm's trademark. Many businessmen agree that Morgan's service is unexcelled. It will do everything from solving the complex problem of establishing the market values of new shares—even though the companies have no established value—to working out a novel method of financing freight cars or oil tankers. After being turned down by several banks, a group of utilities that wanted to finance an atomic reactor turned to Morgan; in a few days, the bank set up the plan to do the job. When General Electric asked Morgan Guaranty to buy up the shares of an affiliate abroad, the bank doggedly pursued one widow from city to city all over Europe until she finally sold her shares.
Over and above its stable of keen financial brains, the bank has one great advantage over almost all others. Through its long history, it established, financed or otherwise contributed to the success of dozens of U.S. corporate giants. Having benefited from the financial brains of the bank, many a corporation would think of going nowhere else. Said one loyal customer: "Memories are long in the banking world."
Power & Ruthlessness. The history of the House of Morgan is almost the story of U.S. banking. Founder J. Pierpont Morgan was a great builder and dreamer who helped build the U.S.—and grew so powerful that he helped run it. Morgan left his father's London banking firm at 20 to try his own luck on Wall Street. After acting as agent for his father's firm, he went into business for himself under the name of J. Pierpont Morgan & Co. He performed dazzling feats of finance one after another. His method was to buy control of banks and other financial institutions, use them to seize a dominating role in corporations, then reorganize, merge and centralize the corporations in a process that became known as "Morganization."
Morgan won control of some 50% of the railroad mileage of the U.S., merged the roads so efficiently that they were soon earning $300 million a year. He helped put together such later industrial giants as General Electric, merged several companies to form U.S. Steel, with the steel works of Andrew Carnegie as its nucleus. When Carnegie scrawled the price he wanted on a scrap of paper ($447 million), Morgan characteristically glanced at it briefly, snapped: "I accept." At one time Morgan controlled six banks and trust companies, three life insurance companies, ten railroads and a cluster of huge corporations. He and his associates held 341 directorships in 112 com panies with total resources of $22 billion.