Jay cooke jr

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From to Jay Cooke was the outstanding merchant banker in the United States. During the Civil War he made possible the sale at par of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of Union government bonds to the American public. Born at Sandusky, Ohio, on Aug. He stopped his schooling at 14 and worked as a clerk in his own community and in St. Louis, Mo.

He arrived in Philadelphia in ; from that time on his activities were virtually always associated with this city, which he made the leading financial center of the country for a brief time. He learned banking in the firm of E. Clarke and Company, where he worked until In Cooke set up his own banking house, a partnership, Jay Cooke and Company, engaging in the characteristic activities of private or merchant bankers: dealing in gold; buying and selling the notes of state banks; trading in foreign exchange; and acting as "note" broker, that is, the discounting of commercial paper.

Great Financier The outbreak of the Civil War gave Cooke his great opportunity, and his many fruitful ideas pushed him to the top of the business. Salmon Chase, the secretary of the Treasury and a fellow Ohioan, sought to sell the Treasury's first issues of war bonds and notes through banks and failed at this time it was customary to dispose of public securities by competitive bidding.

Cooke persuaded Chase to appoint him a special "fiscal agent.

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As fiscal agent, Cooke played another important role: he supported the price of government securities in the New York money market. In January Cooke was called again to handle a large issue of 3-year Treasury notes bearing 7. By the end of the war Cooke had three banking houses, each with a separate group of partners, in Philadelphia, New York, and Washington.