Anthony Joseph Drexel - Banking

Banking

At the age of 13 he began to work in the banking house founded three years earlier by his father, the Austrian-born American banker Francis Martin Drexel. In 1847 he was named a member of the firm Drexel & Company, the original predecessor of what would become Drexel Burnham Lambert.

After the death of his father, Drexel would close the Drexel & Company Chicago Branch and changed the New York Branch from Read, Drexel & Co. to found a new banking firm, Drexel Wintrop. Drexel, Harjes & Co., a Paris-based banking firm founded in 1867 by Drexel, John H. Harjes and Eugene Winthrop, became a separate partnership for the European market.

Three years later, in 1871, Drexel- at the urging of Junius Morgan- became the mentor of Junius' troubled son, John Pierpont and entered into a new partnership, forming Drexel, Morgan & Co. with J. Pierpont Morgan. The new merchant banking partnership, which was based in New York, rather than Philadelphia, served initially as an agent for Europeans investing in the United States. With the formation of Drexel, Morgan & Co., Drexel Harjes became the French affiliate of an international banking firm with offices in London, Philadelphia, New York City and Paris that would subsequently become J.P. Morgan & Co.. Anthony Drexel became the mentor and senior partner of J. Pierpont Morgan. Anthony was also the architect of the modern financial system known as "Wall Street".

Following Drexel's death, Drexel, Morgan & Co. was renamed J.P. Morgan & Co. and is one of the original predecessors of what is today JPMorgan Chase. In the 1890s, the bank financed the formation of the United States Steel Corporation, which took over the business of Andrew Carnegie and others and was the world's first billion-dollar corporation.