The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals
Frank Partnoyamazon.com
The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals
Morgan was among the first generation of bankers whose clients were primarily private corporations instead of governments, but there were substantial continuities in approach. His mediations among the railroad barons were very much in the tradition of the supranational financial/diplomatic service operated by the Rothschilds and the Barings in midc
... See moreCharles R. Morris • The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy
Vail didn’t do any of this out of altruism. He saw that a possible route to monopoly—or at least a near monopoly, which was what AT&T had always been striving for—could be achieved not through a show of muscle but through an acquiescence to political supervision. Yet his primary argument was an idea. He argued that telephone service had become
... See moreJon Gertner • The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
The Valley’s venture investors were typically Boston merchant princes, men such as Israel Thorndike, S. A. Eliot, Samuel Cabot, Francis Stanton, and Harrison Gray Otis. Edmund Dwight, a Morgan cousin on his mother’s side, wasn’t in the same financial stratum as a Cabot, but gained access through his work at the law firm of Fisher Ames, the old Mass
... See moreCharles R. Morris • The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy
McLean had always preferred consolidation to competition; had the U.S. government not blocked him, he would have acquired Sea-Land’s sole East Coast competitor, Seatrain Lines, in 1959, and its main competitor to Puerto Rico, Bull Line, in 1962. Now, on Sea-Land’s behalf, he committed $1.2 billion of R. J. Reynolds’s money to an audacious deal with
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