JPMorgan And GE's Business Relationship Is More Than 100 Years Old

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM)'s relationship with General Electric Company (NYSE: GE) dates back to last century.

According to a Bloomberg report, General Electric has been a client of JPMorgan for 125 years. Way back in 1892, JPMorgan, known as John Pierpont Morgan's Drexel Morgan & Co, actually helped create General Electric by arranging the merger of Edison's company and a rival firm.

Tried And True: A 125-Year-Young Relationship

The relationship survived the test of time and over the past five years alone JPMorgan collected $167 million from General Electric in M&A and other banking fees.

Since General Electric spent more than $100 million in fees alone that means it has been very busy on the M&A front. But now the company faces pressure from activist investor Nelson Peltz to cut costs so few are expecting General Electric to continue acquiring companies.

General Electric paid $1.6 billion to all of Wall Street over the past five years.

"The major pieces have been taken care of at this point," Jeff Windau, an analyst with Edward Jones told Bloomberg in reference to General Electric's M&A activity. "That was kind of an extraordinary period of time for them."

However, the Bloomberg report suggested that General Electric still boasts $10 billion of unallocated capital that it can use on deals, stock buybacks or other activities. While this is a large amount of capital, it is down from around $30 billion last year.

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Image Credit: Joe Mabel [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons