Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, the company is now a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase, one of the largest banking institutions in the world.

Shortly before the bomb went off, an unknown person placed a warning note in a mailbox at the corner of Cedar Street and Broadway.

While theories abound about who was behind the Wall Street bombing and why they did it, after twenty years of investigation the FBI rendered the file inactive in 1940 without ever finding the perpetrators.

[8]: 63  The company also invested in the suppliers of war equipment to Britain and France, thus profiting from the financing and purchasing activities of the two European governments.

Also, many within J.P. Morgan believed that a change in the political climate would allow the company to resume its securities businesses but that it would be nearly impossible to reconstitute the bank if it were disassembled.

In 1935, after being barred from the securities business for over a year, the heads of J.P. Morgan made the decision to spin off its investment banking operations.

In the years following the spin-off of Morgan Stanley, the securities business proved robust, while the parent firm, which was incorporated in 1940,[9] was less profitable.

In 1989, the Federal Reserve permitted J.P. Morgan to be the first commercial bank to underwrite a corporate debt offering.

[10] In the 1990s, J.P. Morgan moved quickly to rebuild its investment banking operations and by the late 1990s would emerge as a top-five player in securities underwriting.

By the late 1990s, J.P. Morgan had emerged as a large but not dominant commercial and investment banking franchise with an attractive brand name and a strong presence in debt and equity securities underwriting.

[11] In the previous decade, Chase Manhattan had emerged as one of the largest and fastest-growing commercial banks in the United States through a series of mergers.

In 2005, JPMorgan Chase acknowledged that its two predecessor banks had received ownership of thousands of slaves as collateral prior to the Civil War.