A Fabulous Debt

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
finance: 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.