The Devil's Banker

He was the most powerful private citizen in the history of American democracy.

J.P. Morgan bailed out the United States government from bankruptcy - twice. He created the first billion-dollar company in history. He stopped banking panics that would have destroyed the savings of millions of ordinary Americans. He held the most powerful railroad executives in the country hostage on his private yacht until they agreed to his terms.

He also paid someone else to fight in his place during the Civil War while he made millions from the same war. He accumulated private economic power so vast that even the President of the United States had to come to him for help.

Was he a hero? A villain? A patriot? A predator?

He was all of these things simultaneously. And understanding him means understanding something essential about money, power, ambition, and the world we still live in today.

The Devil's Banker is the full story of J.P. Morgan - from a sickly child in Hartford, Connecticut to the man who single-handedly shaped the American economy for fifty years. It is a story about genius and grief, about a love that sealed something in him permanently, about a father whose impossible standards drove a son to build an empire, and about what happens to a democracy when one private citizen becomes too powerful to ignore and too necessary to stop.

Featuring the Corsair Pact, the 1895 gold crisis rescue, the Carnegie steel deal, the Panic of 1907, and the legendary Congressional testimony that silenced a room.

This is not a simple story. Nothing about J.P. Morgan ever was.