First-class business
BANKS are being gobbled up like egg sandwiches at a picnic, but I never thought to see the Morgan bank go straight down without touching the sides. It is disappear- ing into Chase, the bank formerly known as Chemical, which bought Chase Manhattan and understandably thought that the name sounded better. Now it must think that its new acquisition would sound better still. Morgan followed Rothschild as the mighti- est name in banking. Pierpont Morgan could bail out his country's banking system single-handed. Only a dozen years ago the Morgan bank could write off its lending to Latin America, hugely embarrassing such banks as Chase, which could not afford to follow its example. Perhaps its conservative instincts were out of fashion in expansive and expensive times, and perhaps Sandy Warner, who heads it, was not in the same bracket as Sir Dennis Weatherstone, his predecessor. 'I'd like to buy Sandy at my price,' a competitor told me, 'and sell him at his' — but he will now walk away with $300 million, so the sums have altered. Jack Morgan, Pierpont's son, put his bank's character into a sentence: 'We have always tried to do first-class business, and in a first-class way.' Not every present-day banker would know what that meant.
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