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Finance History | Morgan Stanley — Eighteen Desks at 2 Wall Street
· 1935-9
Personal memoryBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Finance History | Morgan Stanley — Eighteen Desks at 2 Wall Street
kevin
9/16/1935
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People treat Morgan Stanley as a Broadway tower that arrived already advising governments.
The first desks sat here, at 2 Wall Street, on 16 September 1935.
The Banking Act of 1933 forced deposit banks to give up securities underwriting. J.P. Morgan & Co. kept the commercial book and surrendered the underwriting room. On the afternoon of 5 September 1935, at 23 Wall Street, Thomas Lamont read a statement: partners and staff from J.P. Morgan and from Drexel & Co. in Philadelphia were leaving to form Morgan Stanley & Co. Inc.
Henry S. Morgan, grandson of J. Pierpont Morgan, and Harold Stanley opened the new house eleven days later. The New York Times that week recorded paid-in capital of US$7.5 million in 1935 dollars, common stock held by officers and staff, preferred stock held by those officers and by individual Morgan partners. The firm as a firm put in no capital.
Walker & Gillette's pink-granite tower at the northeast corner of Wall and Broadway had been finished in 1933 on the site of the old United Bank Building. The new partnership took a long room overlooking Trinity's spire and set eighteen roll-top desks in two rows. Stanley arrived at 9:31 a.m. and declined to speak for publication. The Times wrote that the office opened as if it were another week in an old firm.
That split was the mechanism. Glass-Steagall did not invent investment banking. It forced a nameplate change on a trade the House of Morgan already knew, and put the underwriters a block west of the Corner they had just left.
Later accounts put the first year's underwriting and placements at about US$1.1 billion in 1935 dollars. The firm joined the New York Stock Exchange in 1942. Headquarters later moved uptown, to 1585 Broadway.
The pin is the public corner at Wall and Broadway. 2 Wall Street still stands as an office building. Do not try the lobby as a museum.
Photo: Wall Street looking toward Trinity Church, the view from the 1935 window line, via Wikimedia Commons.
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