This week marked the 104th anniversary of the night that ultimately gave birth to the Federal Reserve.
On Nov. 2, 1907, John Pierpont Morgan assembled the presidents of several prominent trust companies in the library of his Fifth Avenue mansion. The illiquidity of their firms had caused what is known today as the Panic of 1907. Morgan forced those rich and powerful men to wait and worry, and by the next morning he had strong-armed them into an agreement that ended the crisis.
It wasn't the first time that Morgan, a private citizen, had come to the rescue of the financial community. And the reaction among the public, and at all levels of government, was a mixture of shame and anger. In response, Congress created a central bank six years later, on Dec. 23, 1913.
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