Bond Yields Are Rising. A Bond Nerd Explains Why It Matters

You cannot pretend to know anything about global finance and the global economy if you don't understand the bond market. It is what defines everything. Everything else is basically a side show. If you don't understand the bond market, you don't understand finance, I'd say. Good morning, Drew Daly show. Just Toby here today since Neil is on a well-earned vacation, but I won't be alone. I'm joined by a self-proclaimed bond dude to talk about. You guessed it? Bonds. One day October 12th, let's ride. So who brands themselves as a bond dude? Robin Wigglesworth does. He's an editor from the Financial Times, an author of a fabulous debt, a history of the bond market. I'm chatting with Robin today because I think we've said the word bond on the show more in the past few months than Ian Fleming did over the course of every James Bond book, Geilds, coupon rates, US treasuries, what does it all mean and more importantly, how does it affect you? Robin and I talk about where bonds come from if the US is borrowing is as big of an issue as it seems and how if you don't understand the bond market, you can't understand the world as we know it. But first, a word from our sponsor into it. Alright, everyone, let's play a little game of would you rather? Would you rather deal with complexity or simplicity? Feels like a toss up, simplicity is so simple, but complexity, man, is that a lot to deal with? But I'm craving simplicity, same as CFOs and finance teams stuck logging into four systems to close one month, rebuilding every report in a spreadsheet and paying for add-ons. They were told they wouldn't need. Thankfully, there's the Intuit ERP for that. Your team runs one close, however many entities you have. They build their own reports, no consultant required, and Gating started doesn't take over your year, all without the legacy ERP baggage. To learn more, head to Intuit.com/ERP, that's Intuit.com/ERP. Now here's my interview with Robin. Robin, thanks so much for joining us. No thanks for having me, Toby. Alright, so you make the case that the bond market is the most powerful force in the global economy with the ability to bring governments to its knees. So why is it that we obsess over the stock market? And the bond market arguably matters a lot more to our everyday lives. That's a good question. I think it's just the fact that the stock market moves around a lot more. Like we want motion, like we watch Formula 1 because it's fast. We don't watch it because it's really slow. And the bond market, it kind of at its best, it is supposed to be slow. It's supposed to be boring, but it is the most important bit, and it is fascinating and it's important. And yeah, I mean, it's my first love as a financial journalist, so I get a little bit resentful when I see everybody talking about the stock market all the time. But let's back up for a second here when a lot of people hear bonds. Their eyes sort of glaze over and they just sort of start smiling and nodding to find for us what a bond is and what they can be used for. It's a tradable loan. It's a tradable IOU. It's just like a stock you can buy and sell it on the stock exchange. Actually, most stock exchange started as a bond trading venue, like the New York Stock Exchange, people traded bonds there long before they did stocks. And because of that, it kind of that's why you get things like the yield, so the yield is the market interest rate you get, which is like the price relative to the actual coupon, the interest rate they pays. And it's powerful because it's kind of the bedrock to an entire financial system is where companies, governments, hospitals, municipalities, they all fund themselves there. Like the stock market, I was joking it's like trading Pokemon cards, like it's fundamentally if you and I buy a stock between each other, it doesn't really affect Apple or Nvidia. But every day somebody selling a bond, like whether you're town, you're university, your government, the company you work for, that's where money actually, the actual flows of money, that's the bond market and that's why it's so important. So far, we've got the bond market is not Formula One and it's like, or the stock market is Formula One and Pokemon cards, I can't wait to keep track of the metaphors going, going forward. But so you've written this fabulous book, it's called A Fabulous Dead and in it, you kind of tell a series of stories about where the bond market came from, Venice comes to the fore as the birthplace for kind of this financial revolution. What happened in Venice that led to the rise of bonds? Well, it's a war, really, it's amazing how many kind of important junctions and financial history kind of, you can trace it back to a war of some kind. So Venice was kind of the new verish rising power in the Mediterranean, up at a bunch of merchants, financially sophisticated, like they invented double-ledger bookkeeping, banks kind of originated in Venice and they had to go to war against their leaves, which was Constantinople and they needed to raise a ton of money very quickly and the banks weren't big enough to handle it because they were just like individual dudes basically. So they forced everybody in the entire city to lend the government money, but because it was a republic, they had to kind of soften the blows and said, well, we'll make it alone, we'll force you to lend to us, but we'll make it alone, we'll pay you 5% a year and we'll make the receipts tradable. So if you happen to need cash, you can go down to the realtor, which is the big market in the center of Venice and you can sell your receipt to somebody else and they'll get that 5% a year and you can just get cash. And that was kind of a genius thing and when Venice actually lost that war and this loan became permanent, actually they discovered that this was awesome, that you can buy a 5% income stream, which is actually quite attractive for a lot of people because Venice always paid that 5%. And you can buy it and sell it, it uses collateral for other loans, you could use it for trade. It was kind of like an accidental, amazing invention really and it just got copied and pasted by others Italian city states and spread everywhere. It also spread to Britain, you attribute a lot of its rise as a global superpower to having a better bond market than its rivals, tell me more about how its bonds in global might were intertwined. Yeah, the Italians didn't take the bond market maybe as far as it could, it was the Dutch that really kind of started turning it into an actual market with like lots of different issuers. And Britain was kind of falling behind in the 1600s, so they literally, they just basically imported a Dutch prince, copied a lot of Dutch financial inventions like the stock market and things like that, and a bond market and they called it the console market, consolidated in Utes. It was basically like perpetual bonds because they lasted forever, they didn't mature in 10 or 20 years and they usually paid 3% a year and they just created this market and it became like the world's first treasury market. It was like the stuff that everybody bought because it was so risk free, you were lending to the UK Parliament, not some crazy king somewhere who could chop your head off. And when they fought in the Pilionic Wars, that actually England could fund itself almost forever, whilst France depended on bankers and would a carrier, it was not credit worthy. And lo and behold, countries that had solid bond markets, credible finances were accountable, they could borrow more cheaply and therefore won more wars and they became more powerful. Well, take me to America now, when did America discover the beauty and power of public debt? Well, I hate to evoke the musical, but it's Alexander Hamilton, right? He was an incredibly clever guy. He was who was still fighting in the army as a captain or a colonel in the George Washington Army. He studied the British financial system and he really realized that this debt or this credit that people thought might be a weakness of Britain actually was one of its main strengths. It wasn't just the fact that he could fund itself, but that credit, those bonds were like money. Like this is pre-paper money, right? And there's always a shortage of species of coins in revolutionary America. And he realized that if you had tradable bonds, people can kind of use it a bit like money. It'd be like a financial enema is what Lynne Manuel Miranda called it. So when he was Treasury Secretary, he basically said all those states that had borrowed money, the colonies had borrowed money, they defaulted on those bonds. We're going to assume responsibility for them. As a federal government, we're going to pay them all back down. We'll exchange them for new, crisp new federal bonds called Treasury bonds, and we're going to pay them. We're going to restore our credit and show where a serious country. That was important, but really the important bit was kind of actually unifying Americans and all these different states as one borrower. Because suddenly, if you're a creditor, if you lent money to Massachusetts or Virginia, you now owed money by the federal government. You have a vested interest in that government surviving. And that was actually important. And then it was that kind of financial enema element that actually was super powerful for the US. It was like, that's how the New York Stock Exchange trade started. It was people trading Treasury bonds on the streets of New York back then. So I'm kind of noticing throughout history, the countries that could borrow the most money often became the most powerful. So I don't want to jump too far ahead to modern day, but America's enormous national bet is always in the news right now. Is that a symptom of its decline as a lot of people kind of hold it up to be? Or is it just evidence of its continual strength? It's both. I mean, it's hard to be entirely relaxed when you see the 40 trillion mountain of debt that America has accumulated. But you have to realize, and a lot of its recent, right? I mean, you guys have celebrated your birthday earlier this year, happy birthday, by the way, Toby. Yeah. 240 years. America, you borrowed $20 trillion. And in just the past 10 years, you borrowed another $20 trillion. So it's definitely kind of heading in a wrong direction. But it is also a reflection of America's strength. That actually one of the reasons why the Treasury market is so powerful is so influential, why everybody wants to buy it. It's the fact that it's so deep and liquid. So I mean, I'm going to introduce another crazy metaphor here. But you know, if you want to go diving, you don't want to dive into shallow pool. You want to go deep diving into a deep pool. And the Treasury market's like the deepest pool on the planet. So for all these financial investors, I'm in Norway, whether in China, Saudi Arabia, even Russia, people find it really hard to find an alternative. And that's kind of also because it's so big. So look, I'd be great if maybe the Treasury market's not growing at quite this pace. But unless worry than most people are about it, even though, you know, it can get quite tasty at times. So when I see that $40 trillion number and when a lot of people see it, they consider it a burden on future generations. Is that the correct way of thinking about the national debt? To a certain extent, yes. I mean, we are boring from the future. But I think the important thing is looking at compared to not just the size of the economy, the size of the country, the wealth of its people, right? I mean, what's like household wealth in America, like several hundred trillion dollars, like US produces like 35 trillion dollars of economic output every single year. So it's kind of, and this is owed over the next 10, 20 years, 30 years. So I'm not too worried. Like if you had a mortgage that's like one time you're out your income, you wouldn't be freaked out. It'd be actually a fairly small mortgage compared to, you know, your future. And the fact is that the US is as much as it sometimes pains me to say this is just an incredibly dynamic economy. Like it is the envy of the world and, you know, it doesn't always work for everybody equally at all times. But, you know, I find it hard to look at American debtedness and say this is a problem now. It could become a problem in like 10, 20 years. But I think it's going to be more of a slow kind of chronic thing, not like an acute, sudden, nasty shock. But, you know, I hope there's a shock. I'm kind of financial journalists being really fun to cover an American debt crisis as a, as a human being, that's very hell. But as a journalist, that's great fun. Same vote. Okay. Let's talk about the darker side a little bit. How could a bad actor exploit the bond market or just bonds in general because it's happened over and over again in history? There are various ways around. I mean, people have been worried about the fact that obviously America depends on foreigners for a lot of the, it's bond buying. And especially maybe a geopolitical enemy or foe or competitor like China or Russia. I don't be less worried about that, like the idea that China will suddenly dump treasuries because it's like, I think it was Rockefeller or somebody like that, Jay Gould back in the day that said, like, if you owe the bank $1,000, you've got a problem. If you owe the bank $1,000, the bank's got a problem. Well, the US owes trillions of dollars to people overseas and really, we're kind of locked in there with you, like China can't dump those treasuries without basically punching itself in the face. So I just don't see that as a meaningful danger. I think there are other aspects. It's not kind of an 11 and action. It's just like technical fact. It's like the US has been borrowing so much, so quickly lately that hedge funds have become a like a big component of the buying, based on hedge funds now actually own more of the treasury market than China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia combined. And like they provide a valuable service there. I don't think we should be denigrating them, but like the very leverage, the very price sensitive and quite often these structures are super complex and, and, you know, can be fragile as we've seen occasionally. And that's the bit I worry about. And anything that happens in the treasury market does not stay in the treasury market. That is a global problem. Yeah. Well, thank you for taking us to Wall Street because it segues very nicely into my next question, which is how did Wall Street turn these once relatively straightforward investments into extremely sophisticated financial products? I'm in many ways. I mean, really it's the past 50 years. It's like the computer. Like it's amazing what people, when the computer first arrived at Wall Street, the crazy stuff that people got up to, right? So like if you've really taken like some of the people I wrote about early in the fabulous day, like the Venetians and Dutch and the British and took them up to like World War II, they'd still basically recognize the bond market, maybe up to the 60s, but by the 70s and by the 80s, things just start getting very, very, very crazy. And it's because you can suddenly calculate stuff. So you can take like one of my favorite things. And so we're the thing to be excited about, but securitization, like the taking of lots of different mortgages or credit card loans or basically anything that has a cash stream, bundling it up into a bond that can be traded and sold and sliced and diced in any way you want. And that you can only really do properly with, there were mortgage bonds back in the 1800s, but they're basically like super simple two dimensional things. Now they're kind of mental. We're going to take a quick break but come back right after this, Bill, you're late. 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If you want to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com/audio. That's vanguard.com/audio. All investing is subject to risk Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. We all love connecting over a video call, a quick text, or that group chat that never, stops pinging. With AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with Eligible Trade-In. It has the most advanced iPhone camera ever, and a big leap in battery life, so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection, connecting changes everything. Requires trade-in of $230 or more in Eligible Plan, terms and restrictions apply, subject to change, visit an AT&T store for details. What about the rise of junk bonds? These very high-yielding but risky bonds? How did those come about? There were always being junk bonds around, like basically dodgy companies that have issued more expensive debt, but there were typically big companies that used to be great that fell on hard times. They were called Fallen Angels because they went from being rated investment grade by a Moodies or S&P to just being rated below that, and we just call it junk basically. They preferred non-investment grade, of course, or high-yield, but there was a guy called Mike Milken, who's this incredible character, really. It's fascinating. Just one of the smartest, most driven people, probably in the history of American Finance. He thought this was unfair, that all these companies that are being penalized for not being investment grade, when really they paid so much money that you made way more money, as long as you had a diversified portfolio, and made way more money investing in junk bonds than you did in investment grade companies or lending to the US government or California or Chicago. He basically not just created like an investment strategy around it, but created a market. He created the modern high-yield market, he rebranded it high-yield, and he's a controversial guy because he got dragged up in all sorts of regulatory scrapes in the '80s and early '90s, but he genuinely did create something that has helped, God knows how many companies around the world now. It's a global phenomenon, and companies that normally wouldn't have access to the bond market or maybe even the banking system. That's actually a pretty powerful thing, and it was all invented in America. You mentioned Milken in a very modern junk bond example, but you said that there have been junk bonds throughout history. Do you have one that comes to mind as an example of the original junk bond? Yeah, well, I was junk like junk is in the eye of a holder before investment grade ratings. They were also invented in America in the 19th century, because nobody really knew what the hell was going on. So you needed somebody who basically would say, "Oh, this bond is AAA, and this bond is double B or whatever." But the very first bond, the corporate bond ever issued, was the Dutch East India Company in 1622. It was also the first stock as well. That yielded, I think, 6.5% for a four or five-year bond, and that's kind of close to maybe where junk trades now. It's like a high double B rated company, but my favorite is probably because it's such a mental story. It was somebody that was a Scottish adventurer/mercinery who invented an entire country to sell a bond on the London Stock Exchange, and everyone was like, "Yeah, that sounds great. Dude, I'll take that." He just took the money and left. There were literally settlers that tried to move to this country in modern day Honduras. They thought it was going to be this beautiful country of milk and honey, and it was a swampy hellhole, and most of them died. It was, so it's. Poe yes, right? That was the name of a fictional country. I'm going to, I'm going to bust that out next time I'm playing World Cup in soccer. You have to yell at nation as you score. I'm going to go. Poe yes. It, it does sound like something you can, yeah, when you score a goal, I think, yeah. Absolutely. All right, well, obviously the bond market today is dominating headlines, maybe more so that it has in the past decade. So yields are rising to levels that we haven't seen since the financial crisis. Let's just start there. When I say yields are rising, explain why that's important to the average person. It's basically because it sets the cost of money. One of the obvious ones immediately, it means that the US government has to pay more to borrow. And that's not great for American finances, essentially. So eventually, the taxpayers are on the hook for paying that. So that's not great. But it's kind of indirect. But it really, it's just kind of like when I get a more, I live in Norway, when I have a mortgage here, I'm basically competing as the American government to borrow because my bank can buy treasuries or it can lend to me. So when treasury yields are going up, it means that basically the cost of money for everybody on the planet is going up. And it's going up because of, you know, higher inflation. People think maybe interest rates are going to have to go up because the economy is doing better. All sorts of reasons. But it really means the cost of money is going up for everybody. And that's what matters. Like, you might work for a company that funds itself in the bond market. You might need a new 30 in mortgage. So in the US, the 30 in mortgage, the cost of a new one, is tied to the treasury yields, long term treasury yields. So it'll hit you that way. So, but it'll be all sorts of like magical, weird and annoying ways. It will actually affect you on a daily life, even if you don't always see it. I'm curious about your thoughts on Scott Besson meddling in the treasury markets. I mean, he was a bond trader. That's how where he cut his teeth. And now he's trying to like buy his way to lower yields. What are your thoughts on that? They're not great. They're not very positive. Look, I mean, he's a very smart guy. But I think Scott Besson, the hedge fund manager, would have very stern words to say to the hedge fund treasury secretary, Scott Besson, is like they're two different people. I mean, first of all, the interventions have seemed frankly just desperate. Yeah. Like the scale of these buybacks, the buyback program started on the buy. And it's a perfectly smart, clever, technical little thing to deal with very technical aspects of the treasury market. And just, but even trying to like double it or could ruple or 10X it, it doesn't matter. There's a trillion dollars of treasuries that trades every single day. It's like, I sometimes joke that it's like having a water gun, spraying it a for a raging fire. It's, I mean, it's like peeing on a forest fire, really, it just it won't have an impact. And by trying to do it, you're actually making, you're drawing attention to your own lack of ability to do anything. So I think it's dangerous. I think it's because he has to do something to show his bosses doing something, but I think the best way they can and I don't worry about the US, they can handle this. But the best way of dealing with this, you know, racing tax is a bit spending, cutting spending a little bit. And the US is super wealthy, can handle this, but it might need to go through a few things before we get to the promised land. Yeah, I always hear the term like the bond market is the thing that can impose discipline on the US government. Why do people mean when they say that? Because it's not just the fact that it makes it more expensive for the government to borrow, so it ruins the finances. If you have bad finance, it can spiral like your debt can start snowballing. But it's also just the fact that because the bond market is so influential for the stock market, for companies, for everybody, it can break stuff. Like 2008, we think of as a banking crisis, which isn't inaccurate, but it's dangerous to incomplete. It was just as much a bond market crisis. And if you think, remember, Liberation Day in April 2025, like the stock market, I mean, it was quite a serious puke. We're talking like 20% almost from peak to trough. And Trump was like, no, I'm straight ahead. No problem. I don't care. But the bond market looked a little bit sick for like three days, and it was time out instantly. It was like, best end and luck, Nick told him, and he came out and said, look, the bond market was getting a little bit yippie, so we're going to put every pause on these tariffs until things calm down. And I think that goes to show that this wasn't like a financial crisis. I think it was actually smart that they acted when they did, because it showed that they knew if they let the bond market spiral for a few more days or a few more weeks. And actually, you would have been maybe talking about a crisis. And that can, you know, it can be painful for the government. It's how it affects everybody else that affects the bond market, that depends on the bond market. That's when things can just, you just have financial accidents. And you don't want those, essentially. The bond market has gotten a little bit more exciting too recently, because a lot of these corporate giants have waited in with, you know, very attractive yields. I'm talking about the hyperscalers, like meta, like Google, who are issuing a lot of bonds to fund this AI infrastructure build out. Is this a unique moment in history that these very profitable companies are just raising enormous amounts of debts right now? Well, it's not entirely unique. So in like one of the chapters of my book, I talk about the railway boom of the 19th century. And like, it sounds maybe boring, but it was mental. It was just the biggest, wildest, debt-fueled cap expry the world has ever seen. Like it just, it's beyond anything in AI. It was like a century-long intisperse with lots of different booms and buss, massive and vastness free. We're talking like, in the equivalent today, it's of tens of trillions of dollars, hundreds of trillions, maybe if you take the whole century as a whole. And it was a genuinely revolutionary technology, and it was incredible to transform the world, but people still lost tons of money along the way. And I think now AI, like in scale, in just nominal numbers, it is the biggest by far. But relative to the size of the economy, railways is still bigger, depending on like what window you exactly look at. But it is incredible. And it is, I'm not saying it's single-handedly holding the global economy off right now, but it is a major reason why, despite a fair bit of shocks this year, like Iran, the global economy is looking pretty strong, and especially the US is looking strong. Is the bond market okay with this? Are there any queesiness about meta-issuing a bond that almost yields 7% to build the data center in Louisiana? Yeah, it does show that they're kind of now insensitive to the costs of borrowing. They're just like, this is the big thing. We're going to chuck money at it. And whether we pay 3%, 5%, maybe 10% in the future, we don't care. It doesn't matter if this is like the chase of the lifetime for sort of super intelligence. I think it is having an impact on some markets, like so like earlier this year, Alphabet and Amazon both hit up the Canadian dollar market, like basically took big, too big fat delps of Canadian dollars, because they have to borrow so much money they are diversifying away from the dollar market. And that was so big that it probably did cause a bit of indigestion. Other Canadian companies were like, hang on, there's less money around here for us now. In the US, it's just such a big market that it might be having an impact on the edges as it were. Like Scott Bessent has talked a lot about, like, that the US government is kind of in competition with hyperscalers for money. And it kind of is. But we still have to remember that we're talking, so 500, 600 billion dollars total of bond issuance from these companies. And that's kind of what the US borrows in now, what, three, four months, so it is having an impact. I just don't think that's the real cause for what we're seeing in the treasury market. But it is, it is a pretty wild debt spree right now. And this is going to be fascinating. You can see how it plays out. So if I am just a regular Joe and I got $10,000 that I don't want to touch for a decade, is there any reason I wouldn't go to meta and put it in one of buy some of their corporate bonds yielding six and a half percent versus a 10 year treasury know that's yielding 5.3 percent, whatever it is right now. I mean, I spend my life talking to people smarter than me, that still get richly humiliated by the market all the time. So I'm very weirder giving investment advice. But like if you, if this is for the long term, the stock market is still the best way. I mean, really is it pains me to say this is a bond, dude, but like the stock market for the long run, if you can deal with the ups and downs and they're going to be ups and downs, it's still the best place. But yeah, I mean, right now you can lend to the US government for like two years to get almost 5% completely risk free. You're going to get your money back, you're going to collect those for that 5% or 4.8%. That's not bad, I think. Like something that starts and that's kind of why when you can see bond yields start like actually undermining the stock market when people start making that calculus. Investing in meta bonds, I mean, meta is a pretty strong company. So I'm pretty confident it's going to be around, but it can get quite dicey along the way. Some of these bonds are structured quite creatively. So I don't think that's the kind of thing that you'd put your money and forget about it. Like the magic that Mike Milken discovered is that you don't, if you buy one junk bond, that can go bust. Like that can go to zero, ten you can buy. But if you buy 100 junk bonds, broadly speaking, the maths of the higher interest rates, even if ten of them go to like collapse, it does Matti Gouw. He's made so much more money on the others. I think buying individual bonds is kind of tricky unless you're going to learn to like California or the World Bank or yeah, the US government. I still feel pretty confident about that. The US government is still going to be around in a few years' time, I think. - Robin, as a self-profess bond dude with my last question, please just tell every person listening to it, one thing about the bond market that they should hold near and dear, that would make them care more about maybe the less sexier side of the financial system. - Well, I genuinely think you cannot pretend to know anything about global finance and the global economy if you don't understand the bond market. It is the absolute core. Like if you don't understand the bond market, you don't understand finance, I'd say. And that's why it's important. And why it isn't as sexy sometimes, annoyingly as the stock market, except for people like me, but I still think more people should, I see so many people that care about this stuff and know so much and somehow have this massive blind spot that they don't understand the bond market, they don't understand how it grew up and why it exists and how it's shaped the world that we live in today in so many ways. - Sounds like someone should write a book about it. Which you do. - I know, somebody should. - Yeah, I know, and basically exactly why I did it. I did it so I can understand it myself, basically. - That's awesome. Well Robin, thank you so much for joining the show. If you are interested in learning more about the very sexy history of bonds, check out Robin's book. It's called A Fabulous Get, the epic story of how bonds built the modern world. It is awesome. Robin, thank you so much for joining me. - No, thanks so much to very, really low. - Neil, is your money ready? 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