Sublime

Morgan made his specialty the refinancing, reorganization, and rationalization of America’s badly overextended and overcapitalized railroads; his “clients” included some of the largest, such as the Erie, the New York Central, and the Pennsylvania.

All of this was a part of what Robert Reich has called “America’s first great merger boom,” which crested during the years 1898–1902. In that brief, four-year interval, over twenty-six hundred business mergers took place in the United States, involving assets worth more than $6.3 billion. This sharp trend toward monopoly, or at least oligopoly, pro