With relationships an increasingly less important factor after WW II, Chernow documents how Morgan entities shifted gears to compete for business in an era marked by negotiated commissions, shelf registrations, and violent swings in interest rates. Between the wars, the author reveals, Morgan partners (in addition to more conventional clients) treated with Japanese militarists, Nazi bankers, Mexican dictators, and Italian fascists. His successors financed the Allies during WW I and then survived Wall Street's 1929 Crash. To illustrate, Chernow recounts how Pierpont organized major industrial corporations like AT&T, GE, and US Steel, also engineering celebrated "rescues" of the US Treasury in 18. Together or on their own, Morgan firms have been involved in remarkable ventures, escapades, and scandals. Over the years, however, legislation (notably, the Glass-Steagall Act), wars, and other factors severed the ties that once bound them. The House of Morgan, Chernow shows, spawned consequential enterprises on both sides of the Atlantic.
To a significant extent, moreover, the narrative lives up to the subtitle's promise to track the development of latter-day finance. Whereas most annalists leave off with the 1913 death of John Pierpont, Chernow (a former staff member at the Twentieth Century Fund) delivers a start-to-present chronicle, tracing the Morgan dynasty from the mid-19th century-when founding father Junius Spencer left New England to assume control of a London-based merchant bank-through 1987's traumatic stock-market break. A brilliant, generation-spanning history of the Morgan banking empire, which offers a wealth of social and political as well as economic perspectives.
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