Reply #51: Yeah, well, get a load of whose pockets JP Morgan was lining back then. [View All]

This article is a nice addition to the excellent bibliography being built on this thread, by the way.

JP Morgan was certainly one of the wealthy interests of the time, and several of their principals had a hand in the coup attempt. You want motive -- check the timing of banking and securities regulation signed by FDR.

Rogue Whale:

Seventy years after FDR, JP Morgan finally got its revenge against banking regulations with its Chase merger. But a new FDR is watching

by Sam Natapoff,

The American Prospect, March 1, 2004

online at http://www.prospect.org/print/V15/3/natapoff-s.html

...To preserve their historic influence, generations of Morgans have fought financial regulation. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, JP Morgan & Co. was the world's most powerful bank. It was America's unofficial central bank, served as international guardian of the gold standard, and halted periodic financial panics (from which it profited). According to The Wall Street Journal, the "money trust" famously described by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis as the greatest threat to the American economy was simply another name for J. Pierpont Morgan, the bank's eponymous founder.

Morgan exerted extraordinary government influence, particularly with the Republican Party. During the administrations of the 1920s, Morgan men routinely represented the U.S. government at international monetary meetings. President Herbert Hoover frequently phoned Morgan's CEO before breakfast. So many Morgan men, in fact, were on the U.S. delegation to the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference that some observers grumbled they were running the show. Benjamin Strong, governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank from 1914-28 and America's most powerful central banker, began his career at a Morgan-associated bank and would likely have joined Morgan had the bank's partners not persuaded him to run N.Y. Fed instead. This Morgan-Fed connection continues today: Before President Reagan named him chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan served as a corporate director for Morgan.

Morgan was also the Roaring '20s emblem of securities abuse. The 1929 crash saw individual investors suffer as many banks, Morgan chief among them, favored their own stock offerings and profits over their investors' best interests. In May 1933, U.S. Senate Banking Committee counsel Ferdinand Pecora exposed how Morgan reserved shares at reduced prices for certain clients, giving guaranteed profits to former President Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's sitting treasury secretary, the chairmen of the Republican and Democratic national committees, and the CEOs of General Electric, AT&T, and Standard Oil, among others. To curb these abuses, FDR signed the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited commercial banks from underwriting securities, and the next year signed the Securities Exchange Act, which created the Securities and Exchange Commission to police Wall Street and prevent stock manipulation. ...