In October 2021, Robin Wigglesworth was several years into his stint as the Financial Times’ global finance correspondent, based out of his native Norway, when he released Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever. At the time, the Wall Street Journal called it a “magisterial, delightfully written history,” and I relished it as a deep dive into a subject that Bloomberg’s Matt Levine often writes about, tongue in cheek, with blog posts like “Maybe Index Funds Will Destroy Capitalism” or “Are Index Funds Marxist?”
The idea, with so many trillions collectively invested to the point that they own 20% of publicly traded companies, is that they aren’t very capitalist at all, Levine noted in a more recent post titled “Index Funds Are a Bit More Illegal.” To get the full story, dating back to 19th-century French mathematician Louis Bachelier, you need Wigglesworth’s epic, which skates along to the “bullheaded” John McQuown of Wells Fargo in the early 1970s, inventor of the index fund, and Vanguard founder John Bogle several years later, making that fund available to individual investors.
