JPMorgan Chase & Co.

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The J.P. Morgan and Company Building at 23 Wall Street in New York City was the longtime headquarters of J.P. Morgan & Co., a predecessor of JPMorgan Chase.

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JPMorgan Chase & Co. is an American multinational banking and financial services company formed through the December 2000 merger of J.P. Morgan & Co. and The Chase Manhattan Corporation. It is headquartered in New York City. PMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States by total assets.

JPMorgan Chase traces its roots to some of the oldest financial institutions in the U.S. These include The Bank of the Manhattan Company, founded in 1799 under the leadership of politician Aaron Burr, and Drexel Morgan & Co., a merchant bank established in 1871 that specialized in railroad investment. Since 2000, JPMorgan Chase has significantly expanded its assets, acquiring Bank One in 2004 and taking over the distressed assets of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual during the 2007–08 financial crisis.

During the banking crisis of 2023, JPMorgan Chase acquired the assets of First Republic Bank after it was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) due to a rapid deterioration in its asset base.

JPMorgan Chase has an expansive suite of services and operations—from consumer, corporate, and investment banking to financial technology—categorized into four core business areas.

Technology services is a core enterprise function that cuts across all four segments. JPMorgan’s annual technology budget of $15 billion (as of 2025) includes digital banking (such as the Chase mobile app), cybersecurity, electronic trading for the retail market, and algorithmic trading for its CIB division. In recent years, the company has also spent technology resources to research and develop use cases for blockchain technology, digital asset (e.g., cryptocurrency) services, and artificial intelligence applications.

The Morgan branch of the corporation traces its history back to Drexel, Morgan & Co., which was founded in 1871 by J.P. Morgan and Anthony Drexel and played a crucial role in financing American industry. The firm was instrumental in reorganizing major railroads and financing industrial consolidations that led to the formation of U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation.

After Drexel’s death in 1893, J.P. Morgan reorganized the company, renaming it J.P. Morgan and Company, Inc. in 1895. Under Morgan’s leadership, it would become a major powerhouse in commercial, investment, and private banking.

In 1914 (the year after the death of founder J. Pierpont Morgan), J.P. Morgan and Co. established its headquarters at 23 Wall Street, an iconic building subsequently dubbed the “House of Morgan,” symbolizing J.P. Morgan’s banking empire.

Immediately following the panic of 1893, J.P. Morgan personally organized a syndicate of bankers to bail out the U.S. Treasury by providing $62 million in gold in exchange for government bonds. This replenished the U.S. Treasury’s gold reserves, which had fallen to critical levels.

The panic of 1907 arose when several major New York banks were on the verge of bankruptcy. Recognizing that the ensuing financial crisis would have crippled the U.S. economy, Morgan stepped in once again, forming a committee to decide which distressed banks would be rescued and which would be allowed to collapse. His leadership during these crises would help lay the groundwork for establishing the Federal Reserve in 1913.

A sea change in the banking industry’s regulatory environment occurred in 1933 upon the enactment of the Glass-Steagall Act (also referred to as The Banking Act of 1933). Following the stock market crash of 1929, Glass-Steagall was enacted to curb excessive risk-taking and reduce the likelihood of future financial crises of similar scale.

A key requirement of Glass-Steagall was the separation of investment and commercial banking activities to help safeguard bank depositors from speculative risks. J.P Morgan and Co. opted to retain its commercial banking activities while spinning off its investment activities into a new entity called Morgan Stanley, which was cofounded by Morgan’s grandson, Henry Morgan, and fellow J.P. Morgan and Co. executive Harold Stanley.

J.P. Morgan and Co. incorporated in 1940, transitioning the company from a private partnership to a corporation. Two years later, it became a publicly held company, issuing 16,500 shares in an IPO. This move positioned the company for continued growth through acquisitions and consolidations and helped pave the way for a new era of growth.

In 1959, J.P. Morgan and Co. merged with Guaranty Trust Company of New York, a major financial institution that was founded in 1864. The new company was named Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York. In 1969 it (along with several other big banks) reorganized into a bank holding company, a move that helped fuel a wave of consolidations throughout the U.S. in the late 20th century.

In 1988, the bank was renamed J.P. Morgan and Co. By the end of the 20th century, it had become a leading U.S. underwriter of corporate debt and one of the world’s most respected investment banking houses.

A regulatory shift in 1999 reshaped the banking landscape. The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) repealed key provisions of the Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall), namely Sections 20 and 32, removing a key restriction separating commercial and investment banking activities. This act also gave the Federal Reserve greater regulatory supervision over national banks, requiring that bank holding companies and affiliates of state member banks report regularly to the Fed.

The removal of these restrictions allowed J.P. Morgan and Co. and other top banks to expand their investment banking operations.

In 2000, J.P. Morgan and Co. merged with Chase Manhattan to create JPMorgan Chase & Co. The new firm combined Chase Manhattan’s experience in personal and small-business banking with J.P. Morgan’s background in investment banking, government securities, and commercial banking. Bank One of Chicago merged with JPMorgan Chase in 2004. Most of Bank One’s operations assumed the Chase brand name.

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Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co.

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In 2008 JPMorgan Chase—along with the entire financial sector—suffered billions of dollars in losses during the subprime mortgage crisis, a severe contraction of liquidity in credit markets worldwide brought about by the steep devaluation of mortgage-backed securities. In late 2008 the U.S. government invested $25 billion in JPMorgan Chase under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, a law designed to prevent the crisis from causing further damage to the U.S. financial system. In September 2008, the federal government seized the bank holding company Washington Mutual, Inc., and sold its banking assets to JPMorgan Chase. In May 2012 JPMorgan Chase announced that an investment unit of the bank had lost some $2 billion through a complex series of trades in derivatives, including credit default swaps.

Another banking crisis in 2023 was triggered by rising interest rates and depositor panic. JPMorgan Chase acquired First Republic Bank, one of three failing banks (including Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank), in a move reminiscent of its historical role in helping provide stability in the U.S. financial system.

Like many companies of similar size and influence, JPMorgan Chase’s history is not without its share of controversy.

Antitrust scrutiny. Allegations of (and occasional penalties for) anticompetitive behavior have been a part of the company fabric for more than a century. Even J.P. Morgan’s role in government bailouts in 1893, 1907, and 2008 has been seen by many as opportunities to expand the bank’s reach. Although such regulatory actions don’t typically involve monopolistic consumer pricing, it often concerns incidents of collusion, such as long-running litigation tied to alleged rigging of interest rate swaps between JPMorgan Chase and nine other major banks.

Mortgage-backed securities (MBS) scandal. In company with many major banks, JPMorgan Chase was accused of knowingly selling faulty residential MBSs before 2008, misleading investors and contributing to the ensuing financial crisis. In 2013, the bank agreed to a $13 billion settlement with the U.S. Justice Department.

The “London whale.” In 2012 Bruno Iksil, a JPMorgan trader later dubbed the “London whale,” executed massive credit derivatives trades whose sheer volume distorted the markets and ultimately resulted in over $6 billion in losses for the bank. In addition to paying $1.02 billion in fines to U.S. and U.K. regulators, JPMorgan Chase suffered reputational damage, partly due to CEO Jamie Dimon’s early comment dismissing the issue as a “tempest in a teapot.”

Anti-money-laundering failures and the Bernie Madoff scandal. As Bernie Madoff’s primary banker, JPMorgan Chase was accused of failing to report suspicious activity despite several red flags. Madoff’s wealth management business, as it was later discovered, was the world’s largest Ponzi scheme, according to the Justice Department. In 2014, the bank paid $2.6 billion to the U.S. government to settle allegations that it failed to report Madoff’s suspicious activities to authorities.

Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal. Jeffrey Epstein was a client of JPMorgan Chase from 1998 to 2013, when the bank terminated its client relationship. Epstein, a hedge fund manager and convicted sex trafficker, had been facing multiple investigations and cases since 2005 prior to his final conviction and mysterious death in 2019. In 2023, JPMorgan Chase paid $75 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) to settle a lawsuit alleging the bank turned a blind eye toward Epstein’s suspicious transactions supporting his illegal operations. That same year, the bank also paid $290 million to several of Epstein’s victims in a separate class-action lawsuit.

Where did Jeffrey Epstein get his money?

Market manipulation. In 2020, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay over $920 million to settle a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) investigation into its alleged market manipulation practices—the largest monetary penalty ever imposed by the CFTC in its history. Federal regulators found that from 2008 to 2016, JPMorgan Chase had been placing massive buy orders in the precious metals and Treasury markets with the intent to cancel those orders before execution—a practice known as “spoofing.”