If you’ve been following the financial news lately, you may have noticed something unusual: the bond market is getting a lot of attention.
After a year of tariff shocks, interest-rate whiplash, tax policy changes and persistent questions about inflation and the national debt, bonds have moved from the financial pages into the broader economic conversation. And whenever markets get nervous about where the economy, inflation or government borrowing may be headed, attention tends to turn pretty quickly to the bond market.
Because this isn’t just Wall Street inside baseball.
The bond market influences the interest rate on your mortgage. It influences how much the federal government pays to borrow money. It affects companies trying to finance everything from infrastructure to AI data centers. And it can offer some important clues about how investors are feeling about inflation, growth, recession risk and even the creditworthiness of the United States.
So perhaps it’s time we understood bonds a little better.
And I have to admit, after more than a decade of hosting So Money, I don’t think we’ve ever dedicated an entire episode to them.
Today, we are fixing that.
My guest is Robin Wigglesworth, one of the financial journalists who has been covering these markets up close for years. Robin is an editor at the Financial Times, where he leads FT Alphaville, its influential markets and finance blog. He’s also the author of Trillions, his acclaimed history of the index-fund revolution and the rise of passive investing and ETFs.
His new book is called A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World, and it comes out September 22.
And I should emphasize: this is not a book about how to build a bond portfolio.
Robin has written essentially a people’s history of the bond market — and somehow made bonds genuinely entertaining. The story begins in Venice in 1171, takes us through Amsterdam and the development of modern finance, and brings us to America and Alexander Hamilton, whose decisions about government debt helped establish the creditworthiness of the young United States.
Robin’s larger argument is that we tend to think the stock market is the star of the financial system, when really the bond market is the foundation underneath it. In fact, as he tells me in our conversation, bonds are the “bedrock that the entire house rests upon.”
We talk about what the 10-year Treasury yield can tell you about the economy — and why it matters more to mortgage rates than many people realize. We talk about America’s nearly $40 trillion national debt and the big question: At what point does all of this borrowing actually become a problem?
We also get into something I found fascinating: bonds have quietly financed some of the biggest transformations in modern history. Railroads. Canals. Telecommunications. The internet. And now, potentially, the enormous buildout of artificial intelligence.
There are also fraudsters, scoundrels and some truly wild financial schemes along the way — including one man who essentially invented an entire country so he could sell its bonds
Learn more about Farnoosh's upcoming literary workshop Book to Brand. Early bird registration is now open!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
