JPMorgan Chase & Co.

One of JPMorgan Chase's oldest predecessor institutions, the Bank of the Manhattan Company, was founded in 1799 by Aaron Burr — the U.S. Vice President who would later shoot and kill Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Burr obtained a charter for a water company to supply clean water to New York City, then inserted a clause allowing surplus capital to be used for "moneyed transactions." He had created a bank disguised as a utility. Hamilton, who had opposed the charter, was furious.

During the Panic of 1907, a stock market crash triggered a cascade of bank failures across the United States. J. Pierpont Morgan — then 70 years old — essentially acted as America's central bank, personally organising a coalition of bankers to inject liquidity into failing institutions. Morgan locked the country's leading bankers in his library and refused to let them leave until they agreed on a rescue plan. The episode directly led to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.

When Bear Stearns collapsed in March 2008, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon agreed to acquire it for $2 per share — later revised to $10 — in a deal orchestrated over a single weekend with the U.S. Federal Reserve. The deal was considered a rescue of the financial system. Six months later, JPMorgan acquired Washington Mutual in the largest bank failure in U.S. history. JPMorgan emerged from the 2008 financial crisis stronger than it entered.

In 2012, a JPMorgan trader in London nicknamed "the London Whale" accumulated such large positions in credit derivatives that his trades were moving the entire market. When the positions went wrong, JPMorgan lost $6.2 billion. CEO Jamie Dimon had initially dismissed reports of the trades as "a tempest in a teapot." The episode resulted in $920 million in regulatory fines and became a case study in risk management failure at a "too big to fail" institution.

When First Republic Bank failed in May 2023 — the second largest bank failure in U.S. history — JPMorgan acquired its assets in an FDIC-facilitated deal, gaining approximately $50 billion in deposits and $173 billion in loans. Dimon, who had now steered JPMorgan through the 2008 crisis, the 2012 London Whale, COVID, and the 2023 regional banking crisis, was described by regulators as the most important banker of his generation.