John plerpont morgan is most often thought OF as the bulbous-nosed international financier, the very essence of big business. And he was all of that, having organized or financed more than 40 major companies in whole or in part; among them U.S. Steel, General Electric, Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, AT&T, the New York Times, and the International Mercantile Marine Company, commonly referred to as IMM. The latter was an incredibly ambitious effort to control ocean traffic between Europe and the United States in an era when American shipping was viewed by the big European lines as little more than a footnote. Morgan was involved in many successful enterprises, but IMM was not one of them: in the end it suffered huge losses, went bankrupt and ended up in the hands of a successor.
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