Confirmed word for word in the government’s own record. Under cross-examination by Samuel Untermyer on Thursday, 19 December 1912, Morgan answered: “Not always. That is an evidence of banking, but it is not the money itself. Money is gold, and nothing else.” It sits on page 1081 of Money Trust Investigation, Part 15 (Government Printing Office, 1913). The version people actually share — “Gold is money. Everything else is credit.” — is nowhere in that transcript.
“Money is gold, and nothing else” J. P. Morgan, testimony before the Pujo Committee, 19 December 1912 — Money Trust Investigation, Part 15 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913), p. 1081. · Verbatim: “Not always. That is an evidence of banking, but it is not the money itself. Money is gold, and nothing else.”
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Provenance
The transcript, page 1081
Source
Money Trust Investigation … under House Resolutions Nos. 429 and 504, Part 15
Session
Washington, D.C., Thursday, 19 December 1912 — testimony of Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, continued
Page
1081, under cross-examination by Samuel Untermyer, counsel for the committee
Published
Government Printing Office, 1913
Mr. UNTERMYER. I want to ask you a few questions bearing on the subject that you have touched upon this morning, as to the control of money. Mr. MORGAN. Yes. Mr. UNTERMYER. The control of credit involves a control of money, does it not? Mr. MORGAN. A control of credit? No. Mr. UNTERMYER. You do not think so? Mr. MORGAN. What I call money is the basis of banking. Mr. UNTERMYER. But the basis of banking is credit, is it not? Mr. MORGAN. Not always. That is an evidence of banking, but it is not the money itself. Money is gold, and nothing else. Mr. UNTERMYER. Do you not know that the basis of banking all over the world is credit rather than gold? Mr. MORGAN. It is the basis of credit, but it is not the basis of money.
Part 15, p. 1081
Transcribed from the Government Printing Office text as digitised by FRASER; obvious scanning artefacts in the speakers’ names have been normalised, and the wording is otherwise unaltered.
The word-for-word confirmation is in the government’s own record. Money Trust Investigation, Part 15 ↗ opens with the session of Thursday, 19 December 1912, and carries the exchange on page 1081; Part 14 ↗ covers the previous day, Wednesday 18 December, which is why the testimony is usually dated across both.
Quote researcher Barry Popik dates the remark to 19 December 1912 ↗ and reproduces the next morning’s New York Times front page, which reported Morgan insisting that “money is gold, and nothing else.”
A second, independent scan of the same volume — the University of Michigan copy — is readable at the Internet Archive ↗, and carries the identical wording.
✓Public domain
The line comes from a hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, printed by the Government Printing Office in 1913. It is a work of the United States federal government and was published well before 1931, so the transcript is in the public domain in the United States. Morgan’s spoken words as recorded by the committee stenographer carry no separate claim.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Right man, wrong words
This is an unusual case: Morgan really did say it, and almost nobody quotes him correctly. The versions that circulate are different sentences making a different claim — and the transcript of his testimony rules every one of them out.
✕
The popular wording“Gold is money. Everything else is credit.” Not in the record
This is the form used by nearly every meme, quote site and investing newsletter, but it appears nowhere in Morgan’s testimony — the phrase “everything else is credit” does not occur anywhere in the Part 15 transcript ↗. Barry Popik lists it among the modern misquotations ↗ of the 1912 remark.
✕
The silver variant“Gold and silver are money. Everything else is credit.” Not in the record
Morgan never mentioned silver. The word does not appear a single time in the full text of Part 15 ↗, which contains all of his 19 December testimony. Popik files this wording, too, among the modern misquotations ↗.
✕
The reversed wording“Gold is money, and nothing else.” Subject flipped
Same six words, opposite sentence. Morgan was defining money, not gold. Popik notes that “‘Money is gold’ is often misquoted as ‘Gold is money’” — and his file shows the flip already in print ↗ in a 1917 book and a 1925 Chase National Bank bulletin, so this one is old rather than modern. Goldmoney likewise observes that Morgan “is often misquoted” this way ↗.
✓What Morgan actually said, under oath on 19 December 1912, was: “Not always. That is an evidence of banking, but it is not the money itself. Money is gold, and nothing else.” It is on page 1081 of Part 15 of the Money Trust Investigation ↗.
Context
Why this sentence mattered
By December 1912 the Pujo Committee had spent months trying to establish that a small circle of Wall Street men controlled the nation’s money and credit. Morgan was the star witness, and Samuel Untermyer — the committee’s counsel and the investigation’s loudest champion — cross-examined him across two days, 18 and 19 December, in a packed marble hearing room.
The famous line came out of Untermyer trying to walk Morgan into an admission: if you control credit, you control money. Morgan refused the premise flat. Credit, he said, was evidence of banking, not the thing itself — and the thing itself was gold. It was not a gold-bug slogan; it was an old banker declining to accept the question’s framing, in a hearing whose findings helped produce the Federal Reserve Act eleven months later.
Before money or anything else. Money can not buy it.
The other famous answer from the same cross-examination
Three pages later in the same transcript (p. 1084), Untermyer pressed Morgan on what commercial credit really rests on. Morgan: “No, sir; the first thing is character.” Untermyer: “Before money or property?” Morgan: “Before money or anything else. Money can not buy it.” He added that “a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.”
The two answers are often quoted as if they contradict each other — money is gold, but credit is character. Read in sequence they do not: Morgan was drawing a line between money (a settlement asset, which he said was gold) and credit (a judgment about a person). Untermyer spent the rest of the session pointing out that the world’s gold supply came nowhere near covering outstanding credit; Morgan agreed it did not.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1837–1913 · American financier & investment banker
John Pierpont Morgan was the most powerful financier in America, the banker who assembled U.S. Steel and General Electric and who personally organised the rescue that halted the Panic of 1907. That last feat made him the obvious target when Congress went looking for a “money trust” — a private cartel supposedly controlling the nation’s credit. He spent two days in December 1912 being cross-examined about it, and died in Rome on 31 March 1913, roughly three months later.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Banking and Currency, Subcommittee. Money Trust Investigation: Investigation of Financial and Monetary Conditions in the United States under House Resolutions Nos. 429 and 504. Part 15. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913, p. 1081 (testimony of J. Pierpont Morgan, 19 December 1912).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Money is gold, and nothing else’?” Last verified 25 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/money-is-gold-and-nothing-else/