Editor's note: ...bonds financing war since their invention: Genoa issued the first recorded public bond in 1150, and Venice followed with the
"prestiti" in 1171–72, a forced loan on citizens' wealth that funded a fleet against Byzantium. Both instruments were born from the same pressure, the need to pay for war without bankrupting the state outright, and they were refined over centuries as Venice and Genoa fought each other, the Ottomans, and beyond. Jewish moneylending families in Venice, including Anselmo del Banco (chartered in 1513) and later Abraham del Banco (who helped found the Banco del Giro in 1619), were woven into this same public finance system, though centuries after the prestiti's origin. Three hundred years later, the Warburg family, descended from the same Venetian del Banco lineage, emerged as bankers in Hamburg, founding M.M. Warburg & Co. in 1798, and their descendants went on to shape modern institutions like the U.S. Federal Reserve.
The scale has changed almost unrecognizably since then. Venice's 1171 prestiti raised the funds for a single fleet; by contrast, the U.S. "War on Terror" is approaching $10 trillion in cost to taxpayers 25 years after the September 11th self-inflicted staged attacks, with initial costs for the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts exceeding $8 trillion and roughly $2 trillion more incurred from operations following the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel (intentionally planned and staged to open up a war on Hamas and Gaza) and the conflicts in Yemen and Iran. Much of this, like Venice's wars, has been debt-financed: interest payments on borrowing for the wars are projected to match total spending on the wars themselves by 2030, exceeding $2 trillion. The mechanism, governments borrowing against future revenue to fund war in the present, is eight centuries old. What's changed is the astronomical scale, and the fact that the debt is now serviced through a global bond market rather than a single city-state's forced levies on its wealthiest citizens.