The Introduction lays out the principal arguments of the book, namely that the history of J.P. Morgan & Co. in the 1930s informs the reader about how the leading American financial institution coped with and participated in, the challenges of a crisis decade, while simultaneously making a case for a broader understanding of capitalism’s survival.

This chapter, devoted to the events of 1929–30, opens three chapters – Chapters 3–5 – which analyse collectively the Morgan role in the coming and development of the Depression between 1929 and 1933. Chapter 3 has as its centrepiece the Morgan effort to end what the partners saw as postwar economic warfare that was undermining European and, by extension, American prosperity. The concrete form that this took was the Young Plan (1929) that revised reparation as well as the establishment of the Bank for International Settlements, conceived as a forum to allow central banks to overcome pressing international questions. The Wall Street Crash, which surprised the Morgan partners – they did not see it coming – was, in the Morgan view, ephemeral. This stance helps us understand why Wall Street was slow to appreciate the downturn. The chapter argues that there was division among the Morgan partners as 1930 progressed on the state of the American and global economy. Leffingwell, the partnership economist, was pessimistic by the summer of 1930. In contrast Lamont continued to evince an optimistic outlook, driven in part by his desire to remain in step with the Hoover administration.

Chapter 7 examines the bubble that occurred in the United States in the 1920s. The roaring twenties in the United States was a decade of increasing prosperity, the democratisation of investment and the development of transformative technology. Between the start of 1927 and October 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased 127 per cent. Then at the start of October 1929, the Wall Street crash occurred, and the market had lost 48 per cent of its value in a matter of five weeks. The chapter then moves on to explore how the bubble triangle explains the US bubble during the roaring twenties. The spark was electrification, which rapidly transformed the American economy. Marketability was high due to the new financial-market infrastructure in place to channel the massive savings of the middle classes towards governments and firms. Monetary conditions were not excessively loose, but the rapid rise of broker loans and buying on margin meant that there was a lot of credit underpinning investment in stocks. Speculation was rampant, with many ordinary people buying stocks in the hope of a quick capital gain. The chapter concludes by examining the contribution of the bubble and Wall Street crash to the subsequent Great Depression.