Creating monopolies was in JP Morgan's blood. Around 1896 he turned his attentions to America's industrial sector, financing mergers that were awesomely massive in scale. He tackled the two biggest manufacturers of electrical equipment in the USA, Edison General Electric and the Thomson Houston Electrical Company and merge them to form General Electric, the biggest and most powerful company of its type in America. To have complete control over finished industrial goods he also needed control of the raw materials, so the steel industry was his next target, and he formed the United States Steel Corporation by merging the major Carnegie Steel Company with the Federal Steel Company and numerous smaller steel manufacturers. Agriculture was then, as now, a major force in the USA and so, naturally, emerged the major manufacturers of agricultural machinery into the International Harvester Company, and since export and import but vital to America's success he emerged most of the transatlantic carriers Into the International Merchant Marine.

Click here for direct line car insurance or churchill home insurance

By using methods which would now land him in a prison cell, JP Morgan was able to not only make himself into an extremely rich man, but he also controlled such vast amounts of capital that he was even able to arrange financial provisions for the US government itself and after a disastrous slump in the stock exchange in 1907 he utilised special government funds to bail out many major banks and other financial institutions which were on the brink of insolvency. This gave him a taste for the banking world and he embarked on yet another round of mergers, consolidations and cooperative agreements between banks and insurance institutions, achieving for himself a huge measure of control over the American financial system, a position which afforded him the fear, loathing and mistrust of millions, as well as the respect of millions of others.

Home