Success Quote by J. P. Morgan

Morgan’s line is the Gospel of self-fulfilling prophecy, delivered with the dry understatement of a man who helped build the machinery that makes prophecy look like “just business.” “Strangely enough” is the tell: he pretends to marvel at a phenomenon he likely engineered a thousand times over. Expectation isn’t a wish here; it’s a posture of authority. In Morgan’s world, to expect something is to line up capital, relationships, and institutional leverage until the “strange” outcome becomes inevitable.

The intent is almost managerial: train your mind toward inevitability, and the surrounding system bends accordingly. That’s motivational on the surface, but the subtext is colder and more revealing. Morgan isn’t talking about the universe rewarding optimism. He’s describing how power operates when it’s confident enough to sound casual. Expectations become signals. They coordinate behavior across a network of bankers, boards, and politicians who take cues from the man presumed to be right. If everyone believes Morgan expects a merger, a bailout, or a market stabilization, then acting as if it will happen becomes the rational move. Belief turns into liquidity; confidence turns into consensus.

Context matters. This is a Gilded Age worldview: markets as psychology, “trust” as both moral word and industrial instrument, and private financiers stepping into roles we’d now call quasi-governmental. Read today, it lands less as inspirational poster material and more as an unvarnished primer on how elites turn expectations into outcomes - not by magic, but by making their expectations everyone else’s reality.