J. P. Morgan

John Pierpont Morgan (April 17, 1837 – March 31, 1913) was an American financier, banker, philanthropist and art collector who dominated corporate finance and industrial consolidation during his time.

A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.

Quotes

• It will fluctuate.
  • Said of the stock market, as quoted in Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (Random House, 1999), p. 11

• I owe the public nothing.
  • Quoted in the New York World (11 May 1901) during the Northern Pacific Corner. See Morgan: American Financier by Jean Strouse

Testimony to the Pujo Committee (1912)

• The first thing [in credit] is character … before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it.… A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom. I think that is the fundamental basis of business.
• [Credit] is an evidence of banking, but it is not the money itself. Money is gold, and nothing else.

Attributed

• If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it.
  • About purchasing a yacht; quoted in "Business Education World" (Gregg Publishing Company, 1961)
• Well, I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do.
  • Attributed by Ida Tarbell in Life of Elbert H. Gary

Quotes about Morgan

• I despise the rule of Rockefeller and Morgan as much as that of King or Kaiser, and am as outraged by Ludlow and Calumet as by Belgium.
  • Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, "Do You Believe in Patriotism?" (March, 1916)

• Only workers are forbidden to be internationalists. It’s perfectly proper for J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford; for the bankers, the munitions trusts, the chemical companies. It’s proper for scientists, stamp collectors, athletic associations, musicians, spiritualists, people who raise bees, to be internationalist – but not workers. Only the clasped hands of the workers across the boundaries are struck down in every country.
  • Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, "May 1st: The Sun of Tomorrow" (May 6, 1941)

• the great fathers Jefferson, Lincoln and Jackson had given way to Carnegie, Morgan and DuPont.
  • Meridel Le Sueur "Crusaders" (1955)

• What J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were to the Age of Robber Barons, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, as well as digital moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are to the contemporary age of the rule of the 1%. Then as now, the super-rich used governments to write laws and rules to allow them to accumulate unlimited wealth; then as now, creating monopolies by enclosing the commons and killing competition is the strategy for becoming the 1%.
  • Vandana Shiva Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom (2018)