Morning Brew Daily - Bond Yields Are Rising. A Bond Nerd Explains Why It Matters

Episode Date: October 12, 2026

#952: Robin Wigglesworth is the editor of the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog and the author of A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World. He joins Toby to explain the history behind the bond market, some of the major players that modernized bonds, and why rising yields actually affects everyone.  You can get a copy of Robin’s book, ‘A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World’ here Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you sucking wind from trying to keep up with AI and its impact? Take a breather and tune in to The Intelligence Shift. Morning Brew's new podcast with PWC. It bridges the gap between big picture AI concepts and what it actually means in practice. Host Dan Priest is joined by expert guests to discuss AI's role in sports, music, HR, and more. Listen to the intelligence shift wherever you get your podcasts. 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 brew daily 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. It's Monday, October 12th, let's ride. So who brands themselves as a bond dude? Robin Wigglesworth does. He's an editor from the Financial Times and 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.

Yields, coupon rates, U.S. 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 U.S. 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. All right, 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 getting started doesn't take over your year, all without the legacy ERP baggage. To learn more, head to intuit.com slash ERP. That's intuit.com slash ERP. Now, here's my interview with Robin. Robin, thanks so much for joining us. No, thanks for having me, Toby. All right, so you may take 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 when 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. It's like we watch Formula One 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. 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. Define 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, 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, that's why you get like 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, you know, it's powerful because it's kind of the bedrock to the entire financial system. It's where companies, governments, government, governments, hospitals, municipalities, they all fund themselves there.

Like, the stock market, I always joke, 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 Nevada. But every day, somebody's selling a bond. Like, whether your town, your 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.

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 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 in financial history, kind of you can trace it back to a war of some kind. So Venice was kind of the Nouveau-Riche rising power in the Mediterranean, a pretty bunch of merchants, financially sophisticated. Like they invented double-edger bookkeeping, banks kind of originated in Venice, and they had to go to war against the Elyge, 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 force everybody in the entire city to lend the government money. But because it was a republic, they had to kind of soften the blows. They said, well, we'll make it a loan. We'll force you to lend to us, but we'll make it a loan. 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 Rialto, which is the big market in the central 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 could 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, 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 other 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 and 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 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 annuities. 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. 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 UK king somewhere who could chop your head off. And when they fought in the Pollyonic Wars that actually England could fund itself, like almost forever, whilst France depended on bankers and Woodacare was not creditworthy. 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 in power of public debt? Well, I mean, I hate to so it 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 George Washington's 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 he could fund itself, but that credit, those bonds were like money. Like this is pre-paper money, And there's always a shortage of species of coins in revolutionary America. And you realize 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 Lin-Manuel Miranda called it. So when he was Treasury Secretary, he basically said all those states that have borrowed money, the colonies that borrowed money that defaulted all those bombs,

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 we're a serious country. That was important. But really the important bit was kind of actually unifying Americans in all these different states as one borrower. Because suddenly, if you're a creditor, if you lent money to Massachusetts or Virginia, you're 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, It was super powerful for the U.S. It was like that's how the New York Stock Exchange 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 is accumulated. But you have to realize, and a lot of it's recent, right?

I mean, you guys have celebrated your birthday earlier this year. Happy birthday, by the way, Toby. But in the first 240 years of America, you borrowed $20 trillion. And in just the past 10 years, you've borrowed $20 trillion. 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 it's, I mean, I'm going to introduce another crazy metaphor here,

but you know, you know, if you want to go diving, you don't want to dive into a shallow pool. You want to go diving into a deep pool. And the treasury market is 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 stop growing at quite this pace. But I'm less worried 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, when a lot of people see it, they considered a burden on future generations. Is that the correct way of thinking about the national

bet? To a certain extent, yes. I mean, we are borrowing 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 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 your income, you wouldn't be freaked out. It'd be actually a fairly small mortgage compared to 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 indebtedness 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 on a financial journalist. It'd be really fun to cover an American debt crisis. As a human being, that's scary as 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 tend to 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 now, Jay Gould back in the day that said like if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you've got a problem. If you owe the bank a million dollars, 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 malevolent action. It's just like technical fact. It's like the US is borrowing so much so quickly lately that hedge funds have become like a big component of the buying base. Like 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 they're very leverage, the very price sensitive. And quite often these strategies are super complex and, you know, can be fragile as we've seen occasionally. And that's the bit that I worry

about. And anything that happens to 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 mean, in many ways. I mean, really, it's the past 50 years. It's like the computer. Like, it's amazing what people, when computer first arrived on Wall Street, the crazy stuff that people got up to, right? So, like, if you'd really take in, like, some of the people I wrote about early in a fabulous day, like the Venetians, the Dutch and the British, and took them up to, like, World War II,

they'd still basically recognise 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 first. favorite things. It's a weird 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 dice 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.

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$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? Well, so there were always been kind of junk bonds around, like basically dodgyer companies that have issued more expensive debt. But there were typically big companies that used to be great that fell on hard times. So they were called Fallen Angels because they went from being rated investment grade by Moody's or S&P to just being rated below that. And we just call it junk, basically.

They prefer non-investment grade, of course, or high yield. But there was a guy called Mike Milken, who's this incredible character, really. It's just fascinating. just one of the smartest, most driven people, probably in the history of American finance, and he thought this was unfair, that all these companies 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, you 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.

So he basically not just created like an investment strategy around it, but kind of created a market. Like he created the modern high-yield market. He rebranded it, high-yield, and kind of did, 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. And that's actually a pretty powerful thing. And it was all invented in America. So you mentioned Milken in a very like 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 like the original junk bond? Yeah. Well, I was joking. Like junk is in the eye of the beholders before like investment grade ratings. They're also invented in America in the 19th century because like nobody really knew what the hell was going on. So you needed somebody who basically would kind of say, oh, this bond is a triple A and this bond is double B or whatever. But like the very first bond that ever, corporate bond ever issued was the Dutch East India Company in 1622. It was also the first stock as well. And that yielded, I think, six and a half percent for a so four, five year bond. And that's kind of close. Maybe we're junk trades now. It's like a high double.

B-rated company. But, you know, my favorite is probably because it's such a mental story. It was somebody that was a Scottish adventurer slash mercenary who invented an entire country to sell a bond on the London Stock Exchange. And, like, everyone's like, yeah, that sounds great. Dude, I'll take that. And he just took the money and left. And, like, 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 poyeas, right? That was the name of the fictional country. I'm going to bust that out next to when I'm playing World Cup and soccer. You have to yell a nation as you score. I'm going to go, poeos. It does sound like something you can yell 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. 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 mortgage, I live in Norway, when I have a mortgage here, I'm basically competing against 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's

doing better, all sorts of reasons, but really it means the cost of money is going up for everybody. And that's what it matters. Like, you might work for a company that funds itself in the bond market. You might need a new 30-year mortgage. So in the U.S., the 30-year mortgage, the cost of it, a new one, is tied to the treasury yields, long-term treasury yields. So it'll hit you that way. So it'll be all sorts of like magical, weird and annoying ways. It will actually affect you on the 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 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 Hedge fund Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. It's 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 under Biden. 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 quadruple or 10x it, it doesn't matter. Like 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 at 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 boss is 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 is raising taxes a bit, cutting spending a little bit. And the US is super wealthy.

You 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 U.S. government. What 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. 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 dangerously 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 puk. We were talking like 20% almost from peak to trough. And Trump was like, nope, 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 Bessent and Lutnik told him. And he came out and said, look, the bond market was getting a little bit yippy, 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. But 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 waded 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 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 expiry the world has ever seen. Like it just is beyond anything in AI. It was like a century-long, interesting. dispersed with lots of different booms and bus, massive investments for you. We're talking like, in the equivalent today, some 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. I mean, it was incredible. It transformed 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 we're know exactly you look at. But it is, it is incredible. And it is, I'm not saying it's single-handedly holding the global economy aloft right now, but it is a major reason why, despite, you know, 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

queasiness about, you know, 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 cost 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 super intelligence. I think it is having an impact on some markets. So like earlier this year, Alphabet and Amazon both hit up the Canadian dollar market. Like basically took two big fat gulps of Canadian dollar. because they kind of have to, they have to borrow so much money.

They are diversifying away from just the dollar market. And that was like so big that it probably did cause a bit of like indigestion. Like other Canadian companies were like, hang on. Like, I mean, there's less money around here for us now. In the US, like, it's just such a big market that it might be having an impact on the, on the edges, as it were. Like Scott Besson 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

500, 600 billion dollars total of bonditions 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 calls for what we're seeing in the treasury market. But it is a pretty wild debt spree right now.

And it's going to be fascinating to 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 6.5% versus a 10-year treasury note that's yielding 5.3%, whatever it is right now. I mean, I spend my life talking to people are smarter than me that still get richly humiliated by the market all the time. So I'm very wary of giving investment advice.

But like if you, if this is for the long term, the stock market, is still the best way. I mean, it pains me to say this as 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 for 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, suddenly 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

companies. I'm pretty confident it's going to be around, but it can get quite dicing long of 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 if you buy one junk bond, that can go bust. Like that can go to zero. Ten you could buy. But if you buy 100 junk bonds, broadly speaking, the maths of the higher interest rates, even if 10 of them go to, like, collapse, it doesn't matter because you've made so much more money on the others. I think buying individual bonds is kind of tricky unless you know, you're going 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. Look, 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. It is what defines everything. Everything else is basically a sideshow. If you don't understand the bottom 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, like I meet so many people that care about their 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 they're doing. 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 did. Somebody should. Yeah, I know.

And basically exactly why I did it. I did it so I can understand it myself. Yeah, 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 Step, the Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World. It is awesome. Robin, thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks so much to be. Really low. Neil, is your money ready? I'm not buying you lunch again. Not what I mean, but also please, I'm so hungry. What I mean is now is the time to get your money ready for a strong 2027. Northwestern Mutual's personalized approach to financial planning can give you the clarity and confidence to end the year strong and move into next with stability and peace of mind. They'll match you with a financial professional who can meet you where you are, ask the right questions to uncover blind spots and opportunities you may not have considered.

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