"'This is the place to stop this trouble!' J.P. Morgan declared on the afternoon of Oct. 23, 1907. After the failure of several trust companies (unregulated banks, kind of like today's subprime lenders), the banker had decided that the collapse of the Trust Company of America would cause too much damage to America's fragile financial system.
"He pulled together leading bankers and pooled funds to bail out the firm. Over the course of two weeks, as a fevered crisis gripped Wall Street and Washington, Morgan acted time and again: saving brokerage firms, rounding up $25 million in cash in 20 minutes to help the New York Stock Exchange stay open, underwriting municipal bonds for New York City, and bringing in gold from Europe to bolster the dollar and replenish Washington's coffers.
"'He essentially single-handedly saved New York City from failure,' said Sean Carr, co-author of Panic of 1907. One of the troubling features of our current, rolling financial crises has been the absence of a single, Morgan-esque financial statesman—someone who can bring a stop to our financial trouble.
"President Bush is essentially AWOL, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke doesn't command the respect of the global markets the way his predecessor Alan Greenspan (who, it is now clear, helped create this mess) did. 'I don't think any one man in today's immense and immensely complex markets could play the role J.P. Morgan played in 1907,' says Jean Strouse, author of the magnificent Morgan biography American Financier. Indeed, the best we have is a troika of unrelated executives who are performing different components of Morgan's historic role."
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