flâneur

How Jamie Dimon Built JPMorgan Into a $4 Trillion Colossus

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This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. One day this past June, I walked to the 51st and Park branch of First Republic, the bank where my wife and I had our accounts. Used to have? The tenses were confusing. Just a few weeks earlier, First Republic, with $229 billion in assets, had collapsed. The third federal rescue in weeks. The market had been frightened, and so had I. Not so much about our savings — our level of deposits was insured — but rather that panic would spread and crash the deposit-insurance system itself. Although I’ve worked in finance for 28 years, I knew about bank runs the same way everyone else did: from the hysterical customers of Bailey Brothers demanding Jimmy Stewart give them their money. Walking up to First Republic, I expected some materialization of disorder — a “Closed for Business” in Sharpie scrawl, a confetti of withdrawal slips. But there was nothing. There were, instead,

Photo-Illustration: Pablo Delcan; Photo: Getty (head); iStock (body); © DBOX for Foster + Partners (building rendering) This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. One day this past June, I walked to the 51st and Park branch of First Republic, the bank where my wife and I had our accounts. Used to have? The tenses were confusing. Just a few weeks earlier, First Republic, with $229 billion in assets, had collapsed. The third federal rescue in weeks. The market had been frightened, and so had I. Not so much about o

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