Two men, nearly a hundred years apart, have found themselves in the same situation: sitting before an outraged committee of Congress defending their banks in the aftermath of a national economic crisis.

Wednesday, it was JP Morgan (JPM) the bank, in the person of CEO Jamie Dimon. In December of 1912, it was J. Pierpont Morgan, the man himself.

Except for the name, it was even the same committee. Dimon testified with seven other bank executives before the House Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, chairman. Morgan appeared alone at a hearing of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, Arsene Pujo, Democrat of Louisiana, chairman.

Morgan -- not the Treasury -- had organized the rescue of American banking after the Panic of 1907 and the stories of what he did have become legend. Morgan collected the most powerful and solvent New York bankers in his library and told them to come up with a loan to bail out failing banks or “the walls of their own edifices might come crumbling about their ears.” Putting a gold pen in the hands of one man hesitating with the agreement in front of him, “There's the place,” Morgan said, “and here is the pen.”

He was hailed as a hero at the time, but the gratitude turned gradually into suspicion and fear. The fate of a whole country seemed to be in the hands of a few wealthy, powerful men in New York. Enter Chairman Pujo and his committee five years later. They were, according to the New York Times, “seeking to learn whether there is a Money Trust that controls finance and business throughout the country.”

J. P. Morgan told them there was not. “MONEY MONOPOLY AN IMPOSSIBILITY, MORGAN ASSERTS; Financier Tells Pujo Committee He Doesn't Know He Has Vast Power and Doesn't Seek It,” ran the Times headline.

The Pujo committee didn't believe him or the other bankers who testified. “There is an established and well-defined community of interest between a few leaders of finance,” it concluded, “which has resulted in a vast and growing concentration of control of money in the hands of a comparatively few men” -- a Money Trust.

That was, more or less, the same populist view that led Andrew Jackson to kill the Second Bank of the United States in 1836. Agricultural interests from the South and West had always objected that a central bank would be dominated by Eastern industrial and money men. That was true of the Second Bank -- and it was corrupt as well.

As a result, the U.S. lacked a central bank like the Bank of England or the Bank of France which could help stabilize a troubled banking system and the country suffered regular panics from 1837 to 1907.

By 1912, people were tired of the recurring panics and coming to the conclusion that however much one disliked the idea, relying on a national central bank was less objectionable than relying on the goodwill and financial power of J.P. Morgan and his colleagues.

Pujo left Congress in 1913, but he and his committee had laid the political groundwork for establishing the Federal Reserve System later that year. Eight years after the Panic of 1907, the United States at last had a central bank.

It has been only months since the Panic of 2008, but it isn't hard to see on the horizon changes of equal significance in economic policy.