A Fabulous Debt

The extraordinary story of the financial promise that helped build the modern world.

Wars have been financed with it. Railroads, canals, cities, and industries have risen because of it. Governments have survived through it and entire financial systems have trembled when confidence in it disappeared.

For centuries, the bond has been far more than an investment. It has been one of civilization's most powerful tools: a promise to repay that allowed governments to borrow against the future, investors to trade claims on distant revenues, and societies to mobilize enormous amounts of capital long before the money itself existed.

In A Fabulous Debt, Graham T. Valecourt traces the remarkable history of bonds and public credit from the earliest experiments in government borrowing to the vast fixed-income markets that underpin today's global economy.

Journey from the financial innovations of medieval Italian cities and the Dutch Republic to Britain's rise as a credit-powered global power. Follow Alexander Hamilton's battle to establish American public credit, the bonds that financed canals and railroads, the borrowing behind two world wars, and the transformation of debt into one of Wall Street's most sophisticated businesses.

Then enter the modern era: inflation and the Volcker shock, junk bonds and financial engineering, mortgage securitization, the 2008 financial crisis, years of near-zero interest rates, the pandemic borrowing explosion, and the difficult question now confronting heavily indebted governments around the world:

How much can the future be asked to pay for the present?

Along the way, discover:

>- How borrowing helped nations finance wars, infrastructure, and economic expansion

- Why bond prices and interest rates reveal what markets believe about the future

- How inflation can quietly transfer wealth between borrowers and lenders

- Why leverage, liquidity, and refinancing can turn ordinary debt into a financial crisis

- How mortgages were transformed into securities before the crash of 2008

- Why today's enormous public debts matter-and why the headline number alone never tells the whole story

Accessible to readers without a finance background yet substantial enough for investors, economics readers, and history enthusiasts, A Fabulous Debt reveals how borrowing became an institution, how trust became financial infrastructure, and how a simple promise to repay helped transform the world.

To understand modern money, markets, governments, and financial crises, you first have to understand the extraordinary history of debt.