These institutions—the House of Cooke, Fisk & Hatch, J. S. Morgan & Co., J. & W. Seligman & Co., Lehman Brothers, and Kuhn, Loeb & Co.—had first arisen to serve the state: selling government bonds and making loans. Many were creations of the Civil War. As bond issues became larger, investment houses created syndicates to split the risks, buying railroad bonds below par, and then reselling them to investors in the United States and Europe at a markup.
