The Hater's Guide To Bonds With Rob Wigglesworth

A 42-minute Better Offline episode, released 14 October 2026, in which Ed Zitron asks the Financial Times journalist Robin Wigglesworth, author of A Fabulous Debt (2026), a run of beginner’s questions about bonds. It is a primer first. Bonds are loans you can trade, issued by governments, cities, companies and bodies like the World Bank, and they make up more than half of the world’s debt; he puts the whole market near $200 trillion. Price and yield move in opposite directions. The 10-year Treasury became the benchmark more by habit than design, after the US stopped selling 30-year bonds during its 1990s surpluses. Moves are quoted in basis points because they are small, and because the Treasury market sets the price of money for everyone else, even someone borrowing from a bank in Norway.

The AI part is about who pays for the data centres. The big cloud companies came into the boom holding more cash than debt, but their spending has outrun what their other businesses earn, so they have sold roughly half a trillion dollars of bonds, plus more creative off-balance-sheet financing. That has changed what the corporate bond market looks like, long dominated by utilities and miners. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued that this issuance pushes up the government’s borrowing costs. Wigglesworth thinks it’s a factor with a lower-case f: about three months of Treasury issuance, against a market that size. Inflation from the energy shock is a far bigger one. Bond yields, he says, are an inkblot test where people see the story they came with.

The rest is about credit. Ratings split the market into investment grade and junk; the triple-C tier is where distress shows first, because bondholders only have downside, and he sees some nervousness there now. Asked how SpaceX can be rated investment grade despite its losses, he points to its huge equity value, which sits beneath the bondholders as a cushion. Maturity walls look frightening on a chart; they become dangerous only when they meet a downturn or a borrower that can’t refinance, and Oracle is the one he’d watch. He expects the tech industry to discover the joys of debt, and then what it can destroy.