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A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World
From veteran Financial Times journalist, an epic history of the debt that built the modern world.
Long considered the "boring" corner of finance, bonds are anything but. They have funded everything from the Crusades to climate tech, Netflix series to AI data centers. They are now bigger than the stock market and rival even the global banking system in influence. They are also misunderstood—treated as mere debt, when in fact their form, function, and impact are radically different.
In A Fabulous Debt, Robin Wigglesworth—The Financial Times’ Global Finance Correspondent, and author of the acclaimed Trillions—offers a sweeping, affectionate history of the bond market. From the dam-builders of 17th-century Holland to the trillion-dollar portfolios of BlackRock, this is a people’s history of rich in drama, full of colorful characters, and bursting with insight.
With clarity and wit, Wigglesworth takes readers from medieval Venice to modern Wall Street, tracing how bonds evolved from obscure financial instruments into the invisible architecture of the modern world. Along the way, we meet warlords and water boards, merchant princes and mathematicians, financiers and fraudsters—all of whom helped build the most powerful machine in global finance. This isn’t just a book about the past. It's a guide to the present and future of the financial system—and a love letter to the engine that keeps it running.
Long considered the "boring" corner of finance, bonds are anything but. They have funded everything from the Crusades to climate tech, Netflix series to AI data centers. They are now bigger than the stock market and rival even the global banking system in influence. They are also misunderstood—treated as mere debt, when in fact their form, function, and impact are radically different.
In A Fabulous Debt, Robin Wigglesworth—The Financial Times’ Global Finance Correspondent, and author of the acclaimed Trillions—offers a sweeping, affectionate history of the bond market. From the dam-builders of 17th-century Holland to the trillion-dollar portfolios of BlackRock, this is a people’s history of rich in drama, full of colorful characters, and bursting with insight.
With clarity and wit, Wigglesworth takes readers from medieval Venice to modern Wall Street, tracing how bonds evolved from obscure financial instruments into the invisible architecture of the modern world. Along the way, we meet warlords and water boards, merchant princes and mathematicians, financiers and fraudsters—all of whom helped build the most powerful machine in global finance. This isn’t just a book about the past. It's a guide to the present and future of the financial system—and a love letter to the engine that keeps it running.
404 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 24, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 3, 2026
Finance is an art. Not Yes or No, Right or Wrong. It is an art form, an understanding of who should be the companies of the future, and how to structure transactions. It is an form greatly misunderstood.
Michael Milken
A Fabulous Debt by FT Alphaville's Robin Wigglesworth is a well-researched and accessibly-presented history of one of the modern's worlds most important achievements, the fixed-income market.
His chronological account begins with what he identifies as the origin of the market in 12th century Venice and proceeds through to the turmoil in markets in March 2020 in the aftermath of Covid and the Fed's intervention (which, unusually in a book that tends to avoid opinion, he argues was justified despite the subsequent inflation), taking in a number of fascinating, and sometimes ill-fated, developments:
We have seen how the Venetians invented the bond in its basic form, the Dutch refined it, and the British turned it into the hidden muscle of their global empire. America used bonds to bind its states together-metaphorically and physically—and to successfully fight two titanic world wars. Along the way there have been myriad successes and a few cataclysmic failures, such as the first Latin American debt crisis and the financial crisis unleashed by the collapse of Jay Cooke & Co. In the latter half of the twentieth century, financial pioneers like Warburg, Ranieri, Milken, and Melamed transformed the basic bond market technology and brought it into the modern era.
However, as the new millennium approached, the bond market's most powerful and influential actors were no longer bankers. They were fund managers like Gross and Meriwether, and the tools at their disposal were far more complex than any of their predecessors could boast.
The author comments upfront that "some may still find it overly complex, while others may bemoan the unforgivibly facile treatment given no convexity, Macaulay duration, or reverse repo operations. Some might miss chapters on inflation-linkers or sovereign bond restructuring shenanigans." I'm closer to the second camp than the first but I feel the balance was very well struck.
The early chapters were a little too dry history for my taste, but the book really warmed up for me as it reached the 1980s and Wigglesworth provides a fascinating account of Michael Milken's creation of the high-yield bond market, previously the preserve of fallen-angels, and it's inspiration of his discovery of the financial analysis in Walter Braddock Hickman's study of corporate-bond performance over 1900-1943.
The book's title comes from The History of England by Lord Macaulay (no not the same Macaulay who gave his name to the measure of duration) and his pushback on those who felt government debt was a societal evil:
If the most enlightened man had been told, in 1792, that, in 1815, the interest on eight hundred millions would be duly paid to the day at the Bank, he would have been as hard of belief as if he had been told that the government would be in possession of the lamp of Aladdin or of the purse of Fortunatus. It was in truth a gigantic, a fabulous debt; and we can hardly wonder that the cry of despair should have been louder than ever. But again that cry was found to have been as unreasonable as ever.
[...]
Here it is sufficient to say that the prophets of evil were under a double delusion. They erroneously imagined that there was an exact analogy between the case of an individual who is in debt to another individual and the case of a society which is in debt to a part of itself; and this analogy led them into endless mistakes about the effect of the system of funding. They were under an error not less serious touching the resources of the country. They made no allowance for the effect produced by the incessant progress of every experimental science, and by the incessant efforts of every man to get on in life. They saw that the debt grew; and they forgot that other things grew as well as the debt.
And much of Wigglesworth's work shows how government and corporate debt has indeed fuelled economic growth.
But Wigglesworth opens his account with the story of “Liberation Day” and how Bessent and Lutnick felt forced to intervene with Trump when the 10y UST yield hit a high of 4.5% - but at the time of this view the 10y UST yield had hit 5.3%. And a brief last chapter raises, although does not resolve, the question of whether current debt levels - which in many countries have breached Niall Ferguson's law, which states that any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defense risks ceasing to be a great power - are too high.
The disclaimer I quote below continues that he was avoided potentially fascinating diversions "such as exploring the interlinked evolution of banking, monetary policy, or even money" - and I did feel this was perhaps a more regrettable omission, albeit much of this, including day-to-day developments is covered in FT Alphaville itself, which is available without subscription and is a brilliant resource.
Overall - recommended.
Michael Milken
A Fabulous Debt by FT Alphaville's Robin Wigglesworth is a well-researched and accessibly-presented history of one of the modern's worlds most important achievements, the fixed-income market.
His chronological account begins with what he identifies as the origin of the market in 12th century Venice and proceeds through to the turmoil in markets in March 2020 in the aftermath of Covid and the Fed's intervention (which, unusually in a book that tends to avoid opinion, he argues was justified despite the subsequent inflation), taking in a number of fascinating, and sometimes ill-fated, developments:
We have seen how the Venetians invented the bond in its basic form, the Dutch refined it, and the British turned it into the hidden muscle of their global empire. America used bonds to bind its states together-metaphorically and physically—and to successfully fight two titanic world wars. Along the way there have been myriad successes and a few cataclysmic failures, such as the first Latin American debt crisis and the financial crisis unleashed by the collapse of Jay Cooke & Co. In the latter half of the twentieth century, financial pioneers like Warburg, Ranieri, Milken, and Melamed transformed the basic bond market technology and brought it into the modern era.
However, as the new millennium approached, the bond market's most powerful and influential actors were no longer bankers. They were fund managers like Gross and Meriwether, and the tools at their disposal were far more complex than any of their predecessors could boast.
The author comments upfront that "some may still find it overly complex, while others may bemoan the unforgivibly facile treatment given no convexity, Macaulay duration, or reverse repo operations. Some might miss chapters on inflation-linkers or sovereign bond restructuring shenanigans." I'm closer to the second camp than the first but I feel the balance was very well struck.
The early chapters were a little too dry history for my taste, but the book really warmed up for me as it reached the 1980s and Wigglesworth provides a fascinating account of Michael Milken's creation of the high-yield bond market, previously the preserve of fallen-angels, and it's inspiration of his discovery of the financial analysis in Walter Braddock Hickman's study of corporate-bond performance over 1900-1943.
The book's title comes from The History of England by Lord Macaulay (no not the same Macaulay who gave his name to the measure of duration) and his pushback on those who felt government debt was a societal evil:
If the most enlightened man had been told, in 1792, that, in 1815, the interest on eight hundred millions would be duly paid to the day at the Bank, he would have been as hard of belief as if he had been told that the government would be in possession of the lamp of Aladdin or of the purse of Fortunatus. It was in truth a gigantic, a fabulous debt; and we can hardly wonder that the cry of despair should have been louder than ever. But again that cry was found to have been as unreasonable as ever.
[...]
Here it is sufficient to say that the prophets of evil were under a double delusion. They erroneously imagined that there was an exact analogy between the case of an individual who is in debt to another individual and the case of a society which is in debt to a part of itself; and this analogy led them into endless mistakes about the effect of the system of funding. They were under an error not less serious touching the resources of the country. They made no allowance for the effect produced by the incessant progress of every experimental science, and by the incessant efforts of every man to get on in life. They saw that the debt grew; and they forgot that other things grew as well as the debt.
And much of Wigglesworth's work shows how government and corporate debt has indeed fuelled economic growth.
But Wigglesworth opens his account with the story of “Liberation Day” and how Bessent and Lutnick felt forced to intervene with Trump when the 10y UST yield hit a high of 4.5% - but at the time of this view the 10y UST yield had hit 5.3%. And a brief last chapter raises, although does not resolve, the question of whether current debt levels - which in many countries have breached Niall Ferguson's law, which states that any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defense risks ceasing to be a great power - are too high.
The disclaimer I quote below continues that he was avoided potentially fascinating diversions "such as exploring the interlinked evolution of banking, monetary policy, or even money" - and I did feel this was perhaps a more regrettable omission, albeit much of this, including day-to-day developments is covered in FT Alphaville itself, which is available without subscription and is a brilliant resource.
Overall - recommended.
August 19, 2026
A great read full of history from both centuries ago and a few years ago. If you love financial markets or want to, this is your book.
October 3, 2026
A charming romp through the history of bonds.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews