"On the night of October 22, 1907, J.P. Morgan locked the leading bankers and trust company presidents of New York inside his private library on East 36th Street and refused to let them leave until they had agreed to a collective rescue of the American financial system. The panic had been running for two weeks. The stock exchange had shed nearly half the prior year’s value. Banks were failing across the country. And the single man who stopped it, who manufactured the liquidity, coordinated the commitments, and held the system together through an act of private will, was not a government official, not an elected representative, not a Treasury secretary. He was the richest private banker in the world, operating without legal authority, without democratic accountability, and without any mechanism that would prevent him from doing the same thing in reverse: manufacturing a panic instead of ending one."
https://www.frametheglobenews.com/p/the-last-guardrail
