Additional Detail
Photo credit: Charlie Bibby/Financial Times
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, Wigglesworth offers a sweeping, affectionate history of the bond market. From the dyke-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.
About the Speakers
Robin Wigglesworth is the editor of the Financial Times’ finance blog "Alphaville" and co-host of the new podcast "The History of Money." He focuses on the biggest trends reshaping markets, investing, finance and economics across the world, and writing longer-form features, analyses, profiles and columns. Before joining the Financial Times in 2008, he worked at Bloomberg News. In addition to A Fabulous Debt, he is the acclaimed author of Trillions.
Dr. Richard (Dick) Sylla is a professor emeritus of Economics and the former Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets at the New York University Stern School of Business. He is the author of several books, including Alexander Hamilton: The Illustrated Biography, Genealogy of American Finance, The American Capital Market and A History of Interest Rates. He has been a member of the Museum’s Board of Trustees since 2004 and served as chairman from 2010-2020.