Business 5 min read By Alice Ashford
Robin Wigglesworth turns his gaze to the bond market and America's $40 trillion debt
The Financial Times journalist and Alphaville editor has published A Fabulous Debt, a thousand-year history of the bond market that traces the instrument from medieval Venice to the modern American state — and warns about the dangers of a financial system few fully understand.
Robin Wigglesworth, the Financial Times journalist and editor of the Alphaville blog, has published a new history of the bond market that argues the instrument has been central to the rise and fall of nations for a thousand years — and that its modern form carries profound risks.
The book, A Fabulous Debt, follows Wigglesworth's earlier work Trillions, which chronicled the invention of the index fund. Where that book covered a century of financial history, the new volume stretches back to medieval Venice, where bonds were first issued to fund warfare for an encircled lagoon nation. From there, Wigglesworth traces the bond market through a series of conflicts, including the War of Jenkins' Ear, which was financed through war bonds after rumours that Spanish forces had severed the ear of an English sea captain.
Wigglesworth argues that bonds, not military genius, decided the Napoleonic Wars. England, he contends, could sustain a long campaign against a larger enemy and subsidise allies across Europe only because it could fund itself through a vast consol market. France, by contrast, lacked comparable creditworthiness. He cites a letter by a young Alexander Hamilton, unearthed through a mention in Ron Chernow's biography, in which Hamilton identified England's consol market as the source of its global power. That insight, Wigglesworth suggests, became Hamilton's life work and helped shape the modern United States.
The book also highlights the Erie Canal as a genesis moment for the municipal bond market. Wigglesworth describes it as one of history's great examples of what can be achieved by borrowing money and investing it wisely. Without the canal connecting to the Great Lakes and the Hudson River, he argues, New York City might never have taken on its metropolitan scope, and Philadelphia could have become the dominant financial hub. He notes that Richard Sylla, a leading American financial historian, agrees with the thesis that the canal gave the northern states their shape.
In a recent interview, Wigglesworth said covering finance is like understanding the hidden wiring of the world. He described the first time he understood the bond market as akin to a surgeon looking at an actual beating heart on an operating table. The bond market, he added, is a secret language that few fully grasp, and that opacity is part of what makes it dangerous.
The timing of the book reflects growing concern about America's $40 trillion national debt, a figure that continues to swell. Wigglesworth's history reads less like a finance textbook than a slow-building thriller about a nervous system that nobody bothered to map until it started misfiring. Publishers Weekly called it a must-read for anyone interested in global finance, praising Wigglesworth's Dickensian eye for memorable events and characters.
Wigglesworth's earlier book, Trillions, examined how a band of Wall Street renegades invented the index fund and changed finance forever. That work traced the story from 19th-century French mathematician Louis Bachelier to John McQuown of Wells Fargo in the early 1970s and Vanguard founder John Bogle, who made index funds available to individual investors. The Wall Street Journal described it as a magisterial, delightfully written history. But Wigglesworth draws a clear distinction between the two subjects. The index fund, he says, is the humble hero and the glue that holds the system together. The bond market is something altogether different.
His new book arrives as investors, policymakers and historians grapple with the scale of modern sovereign debt. By tracing the bond from medieval Venice to the Erie Canal and beyond, Wigglesworth makes the case that credit is not a technical sideshow but the force that has united, financed and occasionally destabilised the United States and other nations. The warning embedded in the title is that a system so central to modern life remains, for most people, largely invisible.
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