The Uncanny Parallel Between J.P. Morgan and Tun Daim
History occasionally produces two men separated by an ocean, a century and vastly different political systems, yet connected by an intriguing similarity: both understood that the power of banking extended far beyond money.
J. Pierpont Morgan was born in 1837, when the United States was still transforming from an agrarian society into an industrial power. Tun Daim Zainuddin was born exactly a century later, when Malaya was still a developing colonial economy. Yet both would eventually operate at moments when their countries were undergoing profound economic transformation.
The comparison is not to suggest that Daim was simply a Malaysian J.P. Morgan. Their circumstances were fundamentally different. Morgan was a private financier whose influence grew through Wall Street. Daim, although a businessman with substantial banking interests, eventually became Finance Minister and therefore possessed something Morgan never did have direct access to the machinery of government.
That difference may be precisely what makes the comparison so fascinating.
Banking as a gateway to power
Morgan's genius was not merely accumulating wealth. It was understanding how capital could be organised to reshape entire industries.
He became deeply involved in America's railroads, reorganising troubled companies, arranging financing and consolidating competing interests. His influence eventually extended into steel, where he financed the creation of U.S. Steel, one of America's first great industrial corporations.
The railroad was particularly important. America's rapidly expanding industrial economy depended on railways, yet the industry was fragmented, capital-intensive and fiercely competitive. Morgan recognised that whoever controlled the financing could exert enormous influence over the companies themselves.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, Morgan's financial power had become so formidable that the boundaries between banking power and industrial power were increasingly blurred.
Daim's trajectory was different but, in some respects, remarkably familiar.
He did not begin as a banker. He trained as a lawyer, entered business and property development, and subsequently acquired significant interests in banking and corporate Malaysia. He became Finance Minister in 1984 and would later serve another term between 1999 and 2001.
This was the crucial transition.
Daim entered government not as an outsider to finance but as someone who already understood the language of capital, banking and corporate restructuring. And Malaysia was then undergoing precisely the sort of economic transformation in which such knowledge mattered enormously.
Malaysia's industrialisation moment
America in Morgan's time was building railways, steel mills, electricity networks and industrial corporations.
Malaysia in the 1980s and 1990s was building highways, townships, telecommunications networks, power generation, ports and a modern corporate sector. The country was moving rapidly from an agricultural and commodity-based economy towards manufacturing, urbanisation and services. Infrastructure was therefore not merely about building roads and bridges. It was about creating new economic geography.
A highway could open new land for development. A new township could create demand for banks, shopping centres and industries. A telecommunications licence could create a new corporate giant. A power project could produce a long-term concession. Privatisation could transfer the operation of state assets into private hands.
In such an environment, the person who understood both finance and government possessed extraordinary strategic leverage.
There is an intriguing account that Daim had studied the American approach to highway development, reportedly drawing on research and consultancy undertaken for him. It is impossible, without documentary evidence, to say precisely how much of that research dealt with Morgan's role in American infrastructure development.
But the possibility is fascinating. Anyone studying the American experience of infrastructure, finance and industrial development would inevitably encounter the extraordinary role played by Morgan in railways and corporate consolidation.
And Daim, as a banker who subsequently became Finance Minister and dealt extensively with international finance, would hardly have been unfamiliar with the American financial establishment.
The question, therefore, is not whether Daim copied Morgan. It is whether he understood the same fundamental principle. Infrastructure creates economic opportunity, but control over the financing and corporate structures surrounding infrastructure can create something much more powerful — economic influence.
Where Daim differed from Morgan
This is where the comparison becomes revealing. Morgan had to use private capital to acquire influence. Daim could, as Finance Minister, operate within the state.
Morgan could organise financiers, shareholders and corporate boards. Daim could influence the allocation of public resources, government-linked companies, privatisation programmes and economic policy while simultaneously possessing a sophisticated understanding of private capital.
That combination was unique. It also explains why Daim remains such a controversial figure in Malaysian economic history.
His supporters regard him as one of the architects of Malaysia's transformation — a tough, pragmatic Finance Minister who helped stabilise the economy, developed the capital market and strengthened Malaysian participation in business.
Critics, however, have long questioned whether the boundaries between public responsibility and private interests were sufficiently clear.
One of the most frequently cited examples is the acquisition of United Malayan Banking Corporation by interests linked to Daim's family not long after he became Finance Minister. The episode became emblematic of the broader questions surrounding conflicts of interest in the era.
The issue, therefore, is not whether every transaction associated with Daim should be presumed improper. It is a more fundamental question. What happens when the person allocating economic opportunity understands better than most people how to benefit from that opportunity?
That is where Daim's story becomes more complicated than Morgan's. Morgan operated outside government and had to negotiate with it. Daim operated from inside government.
Najib and the unfinished struggle
There was another political dimension to this story.
Najib Razak inherited a political and economic landscape substantially shaped by the Mahathir-Daim era. There were moments when Najib appeared determined to loosen some of those old networks and establish his own political-economic space.
But confronting an entrenched political-economic network requires more than occupying the Prime Minister's office. It requires the political will to break decisively with the past.
Najib, arguably, blinked.
He did not completely escape the shadow of the old order, nor did he establish an entirely independent political-economic architecture. The irony is that the unresolved relationship between politics, money and corporate power would eventually return to haunt his own administration through 1MDB.
The man who had inherited the machinery of a political economy increasingly found himself at the receiving end of the very problem that had defined Malaysian politics for decades: the difficulty of separating political authority from economic power.
That does not make Daim responsible for 1MDB. Nor does it make the two episodes equivalent. But it does illustrate a recurring Malaysian problem. Political leaders may change. Economic networks often do not.
And then there was Roosevelt
Morgan eventually encountered Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was not opposed to capitalism. His concern was the concentration of economic power to a point where private corporations could become more powerful than the public institutions supposed to regulate them.
The Northern Securities case became the defining confrontation. Morgan and his associates had created a holding company controlling major railroads. Roosevelt's administration challenged it under the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the Supreme Court ordered its dissolution in 1904.
It was an important moment in American history because it established a principle. Even the most powerful financial interests were ultimately subject to the authority of the state.
The Malaysian story is different, but the underlying question is familiar. Daim did not face an American-style trust-busting president. His eventual political confrontation came decades later, under Anwar Ibrahim's administration, in a very different political and institutional context.
Daim himself accused Anwar's government of pursuing him politically; the government and enforcement authorities maintained that the investigation concerned financial affairs and possible wrongdoing. His legal challenge to the MACC investigation was ultimately unsuccessful.
Whatever one's view of that confrontation, there is an undeniable historical irony.
Daim had spent much of his career operating at the intersection of business, finance and government. At the end of his life, he found himself confronting the power of the government from the other side.
Perhaps the strangest similarity
There is, however, one final similarity that is less about money and power and more about what the two men chose to do with their fortunes.
Both developed a passion for art, books and historical objects.
Morgan was one of America's great collectors. He assembled an extraordinary collection of manuscripts, rare books, drawings, paintings and decorative arts. In 1902 he commissioned Charles McKim to build a private library beside his New York residence specifically to house the growing collection. That building eventually became the historic heart of today's Morgan Library & Museum.
After his death, thousands of works from his collection went to public institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Daim's passion was similarly reflected in the creation of a permanent home for art. Ilham Tower houses Ilham Gallery, a public gallery devoted to Malaysian and contemporary art, with the gallery occupying several floors of the building.
It is an unexpectedly human ending to two extraordinary financial lives. Both men spent their careers dealing with numbers, corporations, capital and power. Both eventually devoted considerable attention to things that money could acquire but could not manufacture: art, history, beauty and cultural memory.
Perhaps there is a lesson in that too. The banker spends his life accumulating. The collector spends his later years preserving. And sometimes the things preserved become a more enduring legacy than the fortune that paid for them.
Another story
There is one question, however, that this comparison cannot answer. How large was Daim's fortune, exactly? How much was accumulated through his own business activities, how much through investment, how much through companies and associates, and how much of what has been attributed to him can actually be established?
Those questions have circulated for decades. They remain the subject of speculation, dispute and, increasingly, official scrutiny. But that is another story.
The more interesting story for now is what J.P. Morgan and Tun Daim tell us about the extraordinary power of the banker. A banker does not merely lend money.
At certain moments in a nation's development, the banker can help decide where the money goes, which industries survive, which companies grow, which infrastructure gets built and who gets to participate in the resulting wealth.
Morgan exercised that power from Wall Street. Daim exercised it from a far more powerful vantage point — where Wall Street met Putrajaya. That is the uncanny similarity. And that is also the difference that makes their stories worth comparing.
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
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