Before the Federal Reserve There Was One Man — How J.P. Morgan Personally RESCUED America in 1907

New York, a little before three o'clock on a Sunday morning in November 1907. In J. P. Morgan's marble library on Madison Avenue about 120 bankers have been arguing since early evening, while Morgan, seventy years old, plays solitaire in the next room. A young banker named Benjamin Strong tries to leave and finds the doors locked, with the key in Morgan's pocket. Nobody goes home until the trust company presidents agree to put up twenty-five million dollars to save the weakest among them. This is the full story of the Panic of 1907, in a country with no central bank, no deposit insurance and no lender of last resort. It starts with a failed attempt to corner the shares of United Copper, a stock that doubled and collapsed in days, and runs through the run on the Knickerbocker Trust, which paid out eight million dollars in under three hours and shut its doors, the run on the Trust Company of America, the stock exchange running out of call money, clearing-house certificates, hoarding, and families standing in the cold for three weeks holding their bank books. You will see how a private citizen, J. P. Morgan, came to hold the key to an entire country's money, what he demanded in return, including a steel deal approved by President Theodore Roosevelt before the market opened, and how the panic finally stopped. If you had been standing in one of those lines holding your family's savings in a passbook, would you have taken Morgan at his word and gone home? And was Morgan the hero who saved the system, or a banker who used the crisis to buy a rival? Tell us in the comments. If you like your history with the numbers left in, subscribe for more films about the days money stopped working: bank runs, bubbles, hyperinflations and the swindlers who rode them. Morgan told Congress that credit rested on character: "Money cannot buy it." To the committee it sounded like a confession that the nation's credit depended on a few men in New York. Nine months after his death, on the 23rd of December 1913, Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, and the first head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was Benjamin Strong, the man who had found the library doors locked. Banks holding too little cash, a shock nobody thought was big enough, and a door too narrow for every depositor at once. Six years after the night in the library, America decided that no one man would ever hold that key again. #Panicof1907 #JPMorgan #bankrun #FederalReserve #documentary