The Bank of New York founded in 1784 is the nation's longest-lived bank operating under the same name and management, enjoyed a succession of great leaders starting with Alexander Hamilton, who helped to establish the bank five years before he became the nation's first treasury secretary. During the Great Depression, like the nation's few other banks of undoubted credit and quality leadership, the Bank of New York found itself flooded with deposits in what economists now call a "flight to quality". It merged with Mellon, another bank with a long history of quality leadership in 2007.