3M Co (MMM) Moves Fast and Breaks Things

According to the Roosevelt Institute, “By the close of 1935 … the HOLC had refinanced approximately 20% of all the urban mortgages in the United States — over one million homes — and had lent out roughly $3.5 billon (an estimated $750 billion in today’s dollars).” This program was likely a major inspiration for the Making Home Affordable Program and Home Affordable Refinance Program, similar initiatives launched by President Barack Obama soon after he took office in 2009. These two programs had combined to help refinance approximately 3.3 million homeowners’ mortgages in their first four years of operation and will continue to help homeowners until 2015.

An independent oil industry giant
Phillips Petroleum was formed on June 13, 1917, when brothers Frank and Lee Phillips merged their respective oil companies into one that would bear their name and legacy for many decades to come. With assets of $3 million at the outset, Phillips was not quite of the same scale as some of Standard Oil’s largest post-breakup descendants, but it had enough clout to push forward in the highly competitive oil industry at a critical juncture: The outbreak of World War I had begun a widespread shift toward petroleum fuels from the coal-fired boilers that had previously dominated industry and the sea lanes.

The Phillips brothers had nearly abandoned oil for the stability of banking, but the war’s effect on oil prices and demand motivated their return. This would prove a wise choice, as Phillips Petroleum’s assets swelled to more than $100 million by 1924 thanks to the company’s dominant position in natural-gas liquids — and also because, just over a decade after Phillips’ founding, the American banking sector began to suffer the worst run of failures in modern history. Phillips became one of the earliest proponents of gasoline service stations, establishing many along the side of Route 66, after which both its service stations and its later refinery subsidiary (now spinoff) Phillips 66 (NYSE:PSX) are named. Phillips and Conoco merged in 2002 to create ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP), one of the largest publicly traded oil-and-gas-producing companies in the world.

The article 3M Moves Fast and Breaks Things originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Alex Planes.

Fool contributor Alex Planes has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends 3M.

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