A Fabulous Debt
The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World
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- Reserva
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- Data prevista: 22/09/2026
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- 13,99 €
Descrição da editora
From veteran Financial Times journalist Robin Wigglesworth, an epic history of the debt that built the modern world.
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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The bond market is the world's largest, most sophisticated, most powerful machine," writes Financial Times journalist Wigglesworth (Trillions) in this illuminating history. Noting that the global bond market is approximately $174 trillion, he traces its origin to 12th-century Venice, where, after suffering raids by the Byzantines, leaders extracted an involuntary loan from citizens to finance a fleet of 120 warships. Modern bond-rating agencies like Moody's can be traced back to credit-reporting agencies like that of abolitionist Lewis Tappan, who in the mid-1800s employed 2,000 part-time correspondents to rank the reliability and solvency of U.S. businesses. Among the reporters were four future U.S. presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, who would later use government bonds to finance the Union's Civil War efforts. To help fund WWI, actor Charlie Chaplin promoted Liberty bonds, even making a film titled The Bond, which proclaimed the Liberty bond was more important than the bonds of friendship, love, and matrimony. Wigglesworth concludes with a trip to the Netherlands to celebrate the 400th birthday of the world's oldest "living" bond, which was issued to finance the rebuild of a dike smashed by drifting ice. The author's accessible distillation of data and Dickensian eye for memorable events and characters make this a must-read for anyone interested in global finance.
