Bond markets have done more than finance governments: they’ve helped shape the institutions and products that underpin modern finance. That’s the central argument of Robin Wigglesworth’s new book, A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World, and the thread running through his conversation on Masters in Business. The case is historical, but its subject is practical: borrowing has helped determine how governments raise money, how investors assess risk and how financial products reach households and businesses.
Wigglesworth, editor of FT Alphaville, the Financial Times’ finance blog, works from Oslo with colleagues in London and New York. He joined the FT from Bloomberg News in 2008, where he covered Nordic economics. Since then, his roles have included Gulf correspondent, capital markets correspondent, deputy head of fastFT, US markets editor and global finance correspondent. He took over Alphaville in 2022, bringing a reporter’s range across economics, markets and financial institutions to a publication focused on finance.
Debt as financial infrastructure
The discussion ranges from 12th-century Venice to Treasury basis trades, tracing how borrowing helped build the modern economy. It examines the market’s absorption of the Liberty Loans, the rise of credit rating agencies, and the creation of money market funds and credit default swaps. These examples point to a recurring pattern: debt markets develop alongside institutions and tools that make borrowing, investing and pricing risk possible at greater scale. The products can look technical, but their effects reach into public budgets and everyday finance.
Wigglesworth also discusses quantitative easing and the Federal Reserve, connecting those developments to the bond market’s role in financing economic activity. Central banks and investors operate in a market shaped by public borrowing, but they don’t erase the underlying choices about who lends, on what terms and with what exposure to risk. That distinction matters when debates about bonds collapse into a single argument over interest rates or government debt totals.
One striking example is the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, which Wigglesworth calls “a miracle of the modern world.” The product reflects how deep, adaptable debt markets can shape household finance as well as government funding. A long-term fixed rate gives borrowers a different relationship to interest rate changes than a short-term loan would, while the system supporting that mortgage depends on investors and financial institutions being willing to hold or manage long-dated obligations. This is more significant than it looks: bond market structure can influence the terms on which a household plans one of its largest expenses.
The book’s title draws on Thomas Macaulay, who mocked critics predicting that Britain’s war borrowing would bring national ruin. Those warnings repeatedly proved wrong. But that history doesn’t establish that every level or form of borrowing is harmless; it shows that confident forecasts of inevitable collapse can be unreliable. Wigglesworth’s view of today’s US debt debate is more qualified: his response, as described in the conversation, avoids both alarmism and easy dismissal. The restraint is useful. Debt can support economic activity, but the capacity to borrow doesn’t settle questions about costs, distribution or future choices.
Wigglesworth’s work beyond Alphaville
He also co-hosts the FT financial history podcast The Story of Money with Gillian Tett and writes the Substack Buy The Dip. His first book, Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever, was the subject of an earlier conversation in 2021; the first interview is available online. Together, those projects show a recurring interest in the machinery behind financial markets: how products take shape, how institutions gain influence and how financial history helps explain current practice.
A Fabulous Debt has been published to strong reviews. Wigglesworth’s favorite books include Peter L. Bernstein’s Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk and Liaquat Ahamed’s 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World. The selections fit the book’s historical frame, where financial risk is treated as a force that institutions try to measure and manage, rather than a problem that can be removed. A transcript of the conversation is scheduled for Tuesday.
Implications for readers and market participants
For market participants, the lasting point is that bonds are not simply a gauge of government borrowing costs. Their history helps explain how credit markets came to support financial products, public finance and economic activity at scale. That said, historical success isn’t a guarantee that every new debt instrument will serve the public well, or that market capacity can expand without trade-offs. The interview’s breadth makes the useful question less about whether debt is good or bad and more about what the market enables, who relies on it and how the risks are distributed.
If you’re working in this space, the examples offer a reminder to look beyond headline yields when assessing the role of debt. Market plumbing shapes what borrowers can access and what investors are asked to absorb (and this is the part most people overlook). The long arc, from public loans to modern financial products. That’s the book’s central proposition, and it gives the conversation a frame wider than a routine discussion of rates.
The full conversation, including podcast extras, is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and Bloomberg. Earlier episodes are listed here.
Next week’s Masters in Business guest is Rich Steinmeier, CEO of LPL Financial Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: LPLA). The company has 32,000 advisors and $2.4 trillion in brokerage and advisory assets; Steinmeier has been CEO since October 2024. The earlier Wigglesworth book, Trillions (2021), and A Fabulous Debt (2026) are both authored by Wigglesworth.
Previously: MiB: Robin Wigglesworth on the Rise of Indexing (November 12, 2021)
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