Greg Mckeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.

The popular book on focusing one’s efforts by saying no:

only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.1

The cover says that this book has been out for ten years and sold two million copies. Much of what it has to say has probably already filtered in to the public, productivity-world consciousness.

He quotes Peter Drucker, writing in 2000:

In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time—literally—substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.2

As the internet was introduced and many societies got much wealthier, optionality increased enormously. More messages to read, more shows to watch, more time, and all that. In that context, the technology of “no” was desperately needed. Optionality means that you can do something, but not that you must. But it is also the case that if there is very little you must do, you may end up saying “no” to essentially everything. Hence the think pieces about how the Millennials and Gen Z are becoming social flakes, the think pieces about loneliness, the think pieces about DoorDash. The space between people who say “yes” too much and “no” too much appears to be increasing.

Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance.

A history of the J.P. Morgan family business, from 1838 to 1989. As Chernow writes:

In the popular mind, the two most familiar Morgans—J. P. Morgan, Sr. (1837–1913), and J. P. Morgan, Jr. (1867–1943)—are rolled into a composite beast, J. P. Morgan, that somehow endured for more than a century. Their striking physical resemblance—the bald pate, the bulbous nose, the pear-shaped frame—has only fed confusion.3

To get it all straight, there were actually three Morgans to keep track of.

Junius Morgan was the first. He moved from the United States to London, and became a partner at what would become Morgan Grenfell and what was, when London was the center of all finance, the “chief American bank in London”.4

The second was John Pierpont Morgan, his son, born in 1837, who founded J.P. Morgan and company in 1861.5 The two had long correspondences and saw each other quite frequently for two people who lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the 1800’s.6 J.P. provided his father with detailed information about the American scene. It was during Pierpont’s life, more specifically in the 1890’s, that the Morgan center of gravity moved from London to New York.

Where Junius had dispatched Pierpont to New York as the lesser financial center, so Pierpont would dispatch [his son] Jack to London, soon to be eclipsed by New York. On the eve of an unprecedented industrial boom in America, which would see the creation of vast trusts, the House of Morgan had opportunely shifted its center of gravity westward across the Atlantic.7

The third Morgan was “Jack”, or J.P. Morgan Jr., and he was born in 1867.

Chernow calls the era before the first World War, the “Baronial age”. It was defined by railroad deals and a sense that the bank, having tied itself to the fortunes of a company, should have, in a just world, plenty of control over the company in the form of board seats. Almost always, they got it.8 It was also defined by the Morgan’s preference, generally honored, to run things on their own, without much government control. When that didn’t work, a gentlemanly agreement with the government was considered preferable to competing with other banks.9

When problems did arise, the Morgans understood that they bore some responsibility for fixing them. In 1907, when an attempt to corner the market on the United Copper Company caused a serious panic to spread through the stock market, Pierpont was called on to shore up the entire system and succeeded.

On Thursday, October 24, with stock trading virtually halted, New York Stock Exchange president Ransom H. Thomas crossed Broad Street and told Morgan that unless $25 million were raised immediately, at least fifty brokerage firms might fail. Thomas wanted to shut the Exchange. “At what time do you usually close it?” Morgan asked—though the Stock Exchange was twenty paces from his office, Pierpont didn’t know its hours: stock trading was vulgar. “Why, at three o’clock,” said Thomas. Pierpont wagged an admonitory finger. “It must not close one minute before that hour today.” At two o’clock, Morgan summoned the bank presidents and warned that dozens of brokerage houses might fail unless they mustered $25 million within ten or twelve minutes. By 2:16, the money was pledged. Morgan then dispatched a team to the Stock Exchange floor to announce that call money would be available at as low as 10 percent. One team member, Amory Hodges, had his waistcoat torn off in the violent tumult. Then a blessed moment occurred in Morgan annals: as news of the rescue circulated through the Exchange, Pierpont heard a mighty roar across the street. Looking up, he asked the cause: he was being given an ovation by the jubilant floor traders.10

Pierpont, an old man by then, was a workhorse:

For a seventy-year-old man with a bad cold, Pierpont handled the 1907 panic like a virtuoso. He sucked lozenges and worked nineteen-hour days. He said that he missed Jack. At moments, his physician, Dr. Markoe, plied his throat with sprays and gargles, as if the banker were an aging boxing champ being resuscitated between rounds. The doctor also extracted a pledge that Pierpont would cut down his cigar consumption to only twenty a day! When he dozed during an emergency meeting, nobody dared disturb the royal snooze. One banker “reached forward and lifted from the relaxed fingers, as one might take a rattle from a baby, the big cigar that was scorching the varnish on the table.” For a half hour, he was fast asleep as bankers discussed a $10-million loan.11

This was classic noblesse oblige and it put the House of Morgan in a very good light, for a moment. But if it was true that the system would have collapsed if not for the House of Morgan, that was also a sign of at least one of the system’s “many systemic defects”.12 This led to systematic reform and the creation of the Federal Reserve; “everybody saw that thrilling rescues by corpulent old tycoons were a tenuous prop for the banking system.”13 The new structure benefitted the bank.

The Federal Reserve System that went into operation in November 1914, was, in many ways, a Morgan godsend. It took some political heat off the bank. As Fed historian William Greider has written, “As an economic institution, the Fed inherited the noblesse-oblige role that the House of Morgan could no longer perform—and also some of the resentment.” The diminution of Morgan power was less than met the eye. In many ways, the Washington board, which oversaw the twelve regional banks, was toothless. The New York Fed, in contrast, emerged as the focal point for dealing with European central banks and the foreign exchange markets. So, real financial power remained where it had always resided—on Wall Street.14

With the invention of the Federal Reserve in 1914, the death of Morgan senior in 1913, and the start of the first World War, the “Baronial Age” was over. The middle third of the book, “The Diplomatic Age”, covers the period between the World Wars where the Morgans had enough scope and influence to play an important role in international affairs.

In a fight over the gold standard in Britain in 1931, senior partner and later Chairman Thomas W. Lamont chastised Jack Morgan for public comments he had made. “It may be said that this letter of September 25, 1931, marks the moment when the House of Morgan ceased operating as a family bank.”15

In the early 1930’s, the Glass-Steagall banking act required that banks like the Morgans decide between two types of enterprise: commercial banking (accepting deposits and lending it out for a profit) or investment banking (underwriting and trading securities). Commercial banking, now separated from the risky environment of security trading, was fit for federal guarantees in the form of the FDIC.

In 1935, the House of Morgan made its decision; it would be a commercial bank. All of the other big banks of the era went the other way. The investment banking business was split off and called Morgan Stanley.16 The exact reasoning of the decision is lost. Chernow argues that the securities underwriting business was unpredictable and would become more difficult with new legal restrictions. The banking business, on the other hand, was a stable business that was “more […] consistently profitable.”17

Glass-Steagall scared and threatened the big banks because they felt the two parts of their business—taking deposits and underwriting securities—were mutually stabilizing. Russell Leffingwell, Morgan partner and later chairman, wrote to F.D.R.:

The business of underwriting capital issues is and should be a byproduct business. It is occasional and sporadic. Nobody can afford to be in the business unless he has a good bread and butter business to live on. A house exclusively in the underwriting business is under too much pressure to pay overhead and living expenses to pick and choose the issues it will underwrite.

One reason why our record is so good … may be … that we have no salesmen, very little overhead attributable to the underwriting business and that we have a good bread and butter banking business. So we could and did say no to half of Europe and of South America.18

The last third of the book is devoted to the “Casino Age”, 1948–1989. Here, the “financial field would grow crowded”19 and the banks would be put on the back foot. No longer the “guard over scarce resources”20, they had to find business and make deals. They had to hustle, and they could no longer take a nice, long lunch in the middle of the day.

The elite world of merchant banking faded as the rhythms of the trader speeded up City life. Long lunches at Boodle’s or White’s gave way to twelve-hour days. It was impossible to equip all the trading desks with old Etonians, and so the City became a more egalitarian place. Some people, of course, resisted the new ways. When the Economist tried to track down City executives, it discovered several absentees: “Many were sighted at the Wimbledon tennis tournament, the Henley regatta and the Ascot horse races.” For the most part, however, the City was now a more hectic, grueling place, with people grabbing lunches at the fast-food restaurants and crowded sandwich shops scattered among the Wren churches and new office blocks. It grew in such helter-skelter style that it almost made Wall Street seem gracious by comparison.21

John LeCarré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

The story of the “mole” in spycraft, and the book that introduced that phrase.22

A mole is a deep-penetration agent so called because he burrows deep into the fabric of Western imperialism, in this case an Englishman. Moles are very precious to the Centre because of the many years it takes to place them, often fifteen or twenty. Most of the English moles were recruited by Karla before the war and came from the higher bourgeoisie, even aristocrats and nobles who were disgusted with their origins, and became secretly fanatic, much more fanatic than their working-class English comrades, who are slothful. Several were applying to join the Party when Karla stopped them in time and directed them to special work.23

The book was written after the news of “ideologically committed” moles like Kim Philby and George Blake had been revealed to be spying for the Soviets from within British intelligence, though LeCarré writes that the news had not fully penetrated the public consciousness.24 LeCarré writes in the 1991 introduction:

I never knew either Blake or Philby but I always had a quite particular dislike for Philby and an unnatural sympathy for Blake. The reasons I fear have much to do with the inverted snobbery of my class and generation. I disliked Philby because he had so many of my attributes. He was public-school educated the son of a wayward and dictatorial father—the explorer and adventurer St. John Philby—he drew people easily to him and he was adept at hiding his feelings in particular his seething distaste for the bigotries and prejudices of the English ruling classes. I’m afraid that all of these characteristics have at one time or another been mine. I felt I understood him too well and in some odd way he seems to have sensed this for in his last interview before he died he told his interviewer Phil Knightley that he had the feeling I knew something discreditable about him. And in a way he was right I knew what it was like, as he did, to be brought up by a man so oversized that your only resort as his child was to subterfuge and deceit. And I knew, or thought I knew, how easily the anger and inwardness thus born could turn themselves into a love-hate relationship with the father images of society, and finally with society itself, so that the childish avenger becomes the adult predator, a thing I touched upon in my most autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy. I knew, if you like, that Philby had taken a road that was dangerously open to myself, though I had resisted it. I knew that he represented one of the—thank God, unrealised—possibilities of my nature.25

He also told the Paris Review in 1997 that it was Philby who blew his own cover as a British diplomat in Germany:

Philby was my secret sharer who I never met. By the time I went into the secret world, as I now know, Philby had passed my name to his Russian controllers. It’s a very curious feeling to know that every halfway-perilous thing one did was already known to the Russians miles ahead. I mean I know that good men are scarce. I did not do anything very dangerous or brave. The older you get, the braver you get. I wasn’t very brave. And no, I didn’t know Philby. When I went to Moscow for the first time, in 1987, I met a man called Gendrik Borovik who said, There’s a very good friend of mine, excellent patriot from your country who would like to meet with you. His name is Kim Philby. I said, Gendrik, you can’t possibly do that to me. I’m going to the ambassador’s for dinner tomorrow night. I can’t be the guest of the queen’s ambassador one night, and the queen’s biggest traitor the next. It won’t do.26