J.P. Morgan

J.P. Morgan was the most powerful banker in American history — a man so influential that he personally bailed out the U.S. government during the Panic of 1893 and single-handedly stopped the Panic of 1907 by locking the nation's top bankers in his library until they agreed to a rescue plan. Before the Federal Reserve existed, Morgan was the Federal Reserve.

Morgan didn't just finance companies — he reorganized entire industries. He merged competing railroads into efficient systems, funded Thomas Edison's electrical experiments, and orchestrated the creation of U.S. Steel (the world's first billion-dollar corporation, formed by merging Andrew Carnegie's steel business with others). His method — 'Morganization' — involved taking control of failing companies, installing his own managers, and restructuring them into profitable monopolies.

His power was so vast that Congress investigated him in the Pujo Committee hearings of 1912, which concluded that a 'money trust' of bankers, with Morgan at its center, controlled American finance. The public backlash against Morgan's power led directly to the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 — the government's way of ensuring no single private citizen would ever again be the nation's central bank.