Today, the global bond market is twice the size of the stock market. And while bonds barely move in price compared with stocks, bonds’ slight twitches give far more important information. A slight increase in a bond’s interest rate can serve as a warning that investors no longer trust a company or a government quite so much; a drop in rates can be a reward for hard work accomplished, allowing an institution to raise future funds at a lower long-term cost. But a world of bonds works only when the investors who buy the bonds are extremely nervous and wildly cautious. Bonds, that is, are designed to be safe and boring investments, bought by extremely conservative institutions, like pension funds, insurance companies and central banks. When they are bought by (or on behalf of) private investors, they are supposed to represent the more stable portion of the overall mix. The very nature of stock markets inclines them to collapse every decade or so, and when they do, it can be painful. But a stock-market collapse is not debilitating. If the world bond market were to collapse, our way of life would be over.

On Sept. 17, 2008, in the late afternoon, this almost happened. For a few dramatic days, prominent economists and other financial experts — serious, unemotional people who had never before said anything shocking in their lives — talked privately, if not publicly, about the real possibility of the end of the United States, the end of electricity and industry and democracy. When the bailout money flowed to save the banks, that was just the fastest way to accomplish the real goal: to save the bond market.

And in that moment, the essential nature of the bond market shifted. Previously, the stability of bonds was reinforced by the cautiousness of people who owned and managed them, and vice versa. But the bailout broke this virtuous circle, signaling that the bond market would stay safe even when bond buyers were wildly reckless, pouring billions of dollars, for example, into risky subprime-mortgage bonds. The bailout represented a transfer of wealth from the rest of the economy into the bond market — precisely the opposite of what is supposed to happen. Now, in the moral hand-wringing over Greece and its failure to pay, we see that bondholders expect to be bailed out constantly, even when they were obviously culpable in failing to manage their own risk. The various European Union plans for Greece involve what is essentially a transfer of wealth from poor Greek people to wealthy German bondholding institutions.

The institutions that bought that €7 billion in Greek debt in 2009 made a very bad judgment. Even at the time, it was clearly a foolish gamble — so foolish, in fact, that it can be explained in only one way. They believed that in the event of default, the Germans would bail the Greeks out. And just to be clear: This doesn’t mean they believed that the Germans would be kind to the Greeks. It means they believed that the Germans would be kind to the people who owned Greek bonds, a significant percentage of whom were certain to be German themselves. In lending money to Greece at 5.3 percent interest, they weren’t calculating Greece’s ability to pay. They were calculating the German government’s willingness to help out German banks.

To be fair, the people who owned GR0133004177 did see its value fall by nearly half in 2012, when the Greek government negotiated its second bailout package with the European Union and the I.M.F. But by most estimates, those bondholders should have lost far more, even the full amount of their investment. Instead, the bailout effectively transferred billions of euros from Greek citizens to unwise bond investors.

There is an unsentimental logic to markets. If you make a bad investment, you are supposed to pay the full price — because if you don’t pay the full price, you will keep making bad investments. The only way to get the bond market back to its historic role is to make bondholders feel real fear that they might lose money if they make bad decisions. We need the market to reward bets that are economically wise, instead of those that are politically savvy.