BBC: Almost exactly 100 years ago at 4.45 in the morning of a November day on the corner of Madison and 35th Street in New York a group of some 50 or so exhausted men stumbled out into the street.
Some had not slept for days.
Behind them, on the other side of the monumental brass doors that closed behind them, they left a piece of paper which pledged them collectively to a loan of some $25m - about $10bn (£5bn) in today's money.
Beside it stood a large gentleman with a walrus moustache, who had forced them into the deal which ended a two-week financial panic that had come close to destroying New York's financial system. That man was J Pierpont Morgan.
From 1903 to 1906 the global economy had boomed and the Dow Jones had doubled.
But the global supply of gold to which all hard currency was pegged had not kept pace, and hard cash was increasingly scarce.
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