The man who looked into the ‘actual beating heart’ of the financial system—and saw something ‘profoundly dangerous’

In October 2021, Robin Wigglesworth was several years into his stint as the Financial Times‘ global finance correspondent, based out of his native Norway, when he released Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever. At the time, the Wall Street Journal called it a “magisterial, delightfully written history” and I relished it as a deep dive into a subject that Bloomberg’s Matt Levine often writes about, tongue in cheek, with blog posts like “maybe index funds will destroy capitalism” or “are index funds Marxist?“

The idea, with so many trillions collectively invested to the point that they own 20% of publicly traded companies, is that they aren’t very capitalist at all, Levine noted in a more recent post titled “Index Funds Are a Bit More Illegal.” To get the full story, dating back to 19th century French mathematician Louis Bachelier, you need Wigglesworth’s epic, which skates along to the “bullheaded” John McQuown of Wells Fargo in the early 1970s, inventor of the index fund, and Vanguard founder John Bogle several years later, making that fund available to individual investors.

Who better, then, to tackle the equally epic story of the bond market and America’s $40 trillion—and swelling—national debt? “This stuff is important,” Wigglesworth told me in a recent interview from his home office, “but it’s also interesting and fun.” Where Trillions was 100 years of history, he added, A Fabulous Debt covers a full thousand, dating back to medieval Venice. “The index fund is like the humble hero,” Wigglesworth said, “the glue that holds it together.” But the bond market is something altogether different.

It’s to the credit of Wigglesworth, now the editor of the venerable, voicey FT blog Alphaville, indirectly named after the new-wave science-fiction film by Jean-Luc Godard, that his new history reads less like a finance textbook than a slow-building thriller about a nervous system that nobody bothered to map until it started misfiring. Publishers Weekly called the book “a must-read for anyone interested in global finance,” praising Wigglesworth’s “Dickensian eye for memorable events and characters.”

Covering finance is so fun, Wigglesworth said, because it’s like “understanding the hidden wiring of the world,” with the acceptance that “once you understand money, you also understand you’ll never fully understand it, but at least the world makes a little bit more sense or seems less like nonsense.”

Finance can feel like a “secret language that you and other people can understand,” Wigglesworth said, nowhere more than bonds. “The first time I talked to people about the bond market and understood the bond........

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