The Secret Network Controlling 19th Century America

Описание: December 18, 1912. J.P. Morgan walks into the Capitol Building flanked by 15 lawyers to answer questions about a network so vast it took 30 accountants a year to map it. The result: a 6-foot diagram showing 180 men holding 341 board seats across 112 corporations controlling $22 billion—in an economy where the entire New York Stock Exchange was worth $26.5 billion. Three of those men had personally decided which banks survived the Panic of 1907 and which ones died, because the United States government didn't have the power to do it itself. This was the Pujo Committee investigation—and it exposed how a private network had replaced the government as America's most powerful financial institution.

This video reconstructs the full story—from the structural crisis that put Morgan in power, to the Saturday night in 1907 when he locked 50 bankers in his library and wouldn't let them leave, to the investigation that finally mapped the Money Trust under oath. You'll see how interlocking directorates allowed a handful of men to control competing companies without technically breaking any laws, how Morgan's personal intervention prevented total financial collapse while expanding his own empire, and how Samuel Untermyer's relentless cross-examination forced Morgan to admit that "character"—his character—was the foundation of American finance. By the end, you'll understand why the Federal Reserve, income tax, and antitrust laws were all born from this single investigation.

The diagram documented $22 billion in 1912. Today, the largest asset management firms control over $20 trillion. The scale shifted by three orders of magnitude, but the structure—a small number of institutions channeling capital through interconnected decision-makers—is identical. The Clayton Act banned shared board seats, but shared investors, consultants, and capital sources replicate the same function without anyone needing to sit in two boardrooms. The mechanism changed. The concentration didn't.

William Rockefeller whispered that he couldn't testify. The committee mapped the network anyway. Congress passed laws to dismantle it. A century later, the diagram would need to be considerably longer than six feet.

0:00 - Introduction
1:21 - America Without a Central Bank
3:24 - Morgan's Empire: Morganization
5:22 - The Panic of 1907
7:44 - The Pujo Investigation
10:07 - Morgan's Testimony and Death
11:22 - The Reforms and Legacy

📜 SOURCES & REFERENCES
Ron Chernow – "The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance" (1990)
Louis Brandeis – "Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It" (1914)
U.S. House of Representatives – "Report of the Committee to Investigate the Concentration of Money and Credit" (Pujo Committee Report, 1913)
Jean Strouse – "Morgan: American Financier" (1999)
Robert Bruner & Sean Carr – "The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned from the Market's Perfect Storm" (2007)
U.S. National Monetary Commission – Reports and Proceedings (1912-1913)

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