Robin Wigglesworth
Robin Wigglesworth is an author, veteran correspondent and columnist at the Financial Times, and currently the editor of Alphaville, the FT's award-winning financial blog. From Oslo, Norway he leads a team of writers in London and New York that dig into the most fascinating aspects of markets, investing, business or the global economy.
Robin’s interests and expertise span the whole gamut of finance, from the rise of private capital, algorithm-powered hedge funds or passive investing to the intricacies of government bankruptcy, Islamic finance or central bank balance sheet management. He delights in making often complex subjects accessible and fascinating, both as a speaker and moderator, and delving into history to understand the present — and what the future might look like.
Robin is also co-host of theFT’s financial history podcast/vodcast The Story of Money, alongside Gillian Tett, which explores through crisp narrative storytelling the great events of finance that still shape our world today, such as the parallels between 19th century American wildcat banking and cryptocurrencies or the modern-day echoes of the 1974 Nixon Shock.
He is also the author of Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever, a book on the past, present and future of passive investing and how it is reshaping financial markets; and A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World.
Robin has worked a variety of roles at the Financial Times and Bloomberg. Most have been focused on finance, economics, investing and business in Europe and the US, but he joined the FT as a Middle East correspondent out of Abu Dhabi, where he briefly got to role play a war correspondent as one of the FT’s Arab Spring reporters. He speaks fluent English and Norwegian – and therefore also Danish and Swedish – but his French and German have sadly atrophied beyond repair.
Topics
The Economic Polycrisis
With China's economy now looking sickly, the US dependent on a remarkable debt-fuelled AI investment binge, Japan's shaky bond market, Europe's ongoing scleroticism and the simmering potential for debt crises in several large developing countries, there is no shortage of things to worry about for the global economy. Add in a tumultuous geopolitical environment, commodity shocks, the climate crisis, an increasingly unpredictable America and a long list of potential risks like cybersecurity, and it's no wonder that "polycrisis" has become a popular term.
Robin can explore all these fascinating and important issues—how dangerous they are in isolation and how they might interact in dangerous and unpredictable ways—but also put them in a historical context, and show how the global economy is in fact far more resilient, adaptable and dynamic than many people assume.
Passive investing
Index funds, exchange-traded funds and other passive investment strategies have mushroomed in size over the past decade, and now collectively manage tens of trillions of dollars. The ETF industry alone is now a bigger industry than all hedge funds, private equity and venture capital combined. Robin explains how the humble index fund was born in the 1970s as the first child of Wall Street and the computer age, why its growth was initially slow, and how its recent explosive growth has reshaped markets, investment firms, and companies. However, the backlash is growing, and as even a passive investing fan as Robin can concede, in some cases the criticism contains a kernel of truth.
Bonds
Bonds are often seen as the dour sibling to the racier, more glamorous stock market, but it is the bond market that is by far the biggest and most important corner of the global financial system. Robin Wigglesworth can take you on a tour of just how fixed income was born in 12th century Venice, grew and evolved in the Netherlands,Great Britain and eventually the United States, and eventually became a world-shaping phenomenon and supplanted banks as the dominant engine of modern capitalism. However, that raises a series of thorny issues that politicians, financiers and regulators have yet to fully grapple with.
Quantitative trading
Tom Wolfe’s famous ‘Masters of the Universe’ are no longer suspender-wearing, lacrosse-playing MBA graduates from Wharton, they are science nerds from MIT and Stanford. As Robin explains, the best hedge funds, mutual funds and trading firms are nowadays those that most adeptly harness digital data and systematic, algorithmic trading strategies to industrialise the more artisanal approach of traditional investors. But as Robin will explain, with ever more money migrating to financial algorithms, the dangers of a cascading and hyper-fast financial market breakdown will increase.
Financial crises
Financial crises come in many different sizes and shapes, with the impact ranging from the mundane to the extraordinarily horrible. Robin can both talk about the surprisingly vivid history of financial crises and the myriad ways they have shaped the world we live in, or explore the main fault lines running through the global economy today — and which ones are most likely to cause a violent earthquake.
Videos
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