He made millions betting against economic recovery. Now he wants to fix things

Alighting the train at Canary Wharf, you’re suddenly aware of the crushing gravity of finance, Britain’s monocrop. You can almost hear the money as it moves in vast, invisible swarms from tower to tower. Down below, people scuttle about automatically. It’s disorienting, but Gary Stevenson is used to it; the immense pressure of this place formed him.

Outside a pub across from Morgan Stanley, Gary tells me that trading is not as sexy as The Wolf of Wall Street would have you believe. It’s more like the end scene in The Godfather, when the capos are gathered in Michael’s study and the door slams shut. “It’s full of these men, just men . . . really aggressively competing with each other. These are supposed to be the winners right? But they’re so unhappy.”

Gary tells me how, in 2011, he became the top trader globally at Citibank. He looks at his time there with a mix of pride and horror. A maths whizz as a child, Gary won an internship off the back of a card game when he was at the London School of Economics. Once inside, he made his name betting against the economic recovery of the UK following the 2008 financial crisis. In his first year as a trader, his bonus was £400,000. He was 23.

The money felt “like a crime”. It made him think about his dad who worked early mornings for £20k per year. “I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone.” Gary grew up working class in Ilford, east London, the rebellious son of Mormon parents. He was expelled from school for selling weed and always wanted to be a grime MC. He couldn’t compute that kind of money; it alienated him from friends and relatives. Two years later, he made a million.

“It’s not about being right,” says Gary of trading, “it’s about being right when everyone else is wrong.” But the experts kept being wrong, and the economy kept on deteriorating. After a bout of depression and an epiphany at a karaoke bar in Tokyo, Gary quit, aged 27. He had made a mint out of inequality, but saw that few understood what it was doing to the country. In 2020, via his YouTube channel Garyseconomics, he began trying to convince Britain that without solving wealth inequality we’re all, in his words, “totally fucked for ever”.

It was a departure for someone who, until that point, had single-mindedly pursued making money. In his book The Trading Game, Gary confesses to exploiting economic weakness. “I squashed that thought, and I moved on very quickly,” he writes. At times he embodies the archetypal East End wheeler-dealer, championed during the individualistic Thatcher era. There’s a tension between this and what he says as a campaigner. “I recognise that,” Gary says, “but my lot fucking love it. They love to see someone who speaks how they speak go play with the big boys and not fucking change.” He thinks he was spoon-fed a cultural diet of selfishness from an early age. “If you convince the weak to be selfish, you will destroy society,” he explains. I tell him he sounds like a Marxist. “I ain’t read no fuckin’ Marx”, he retorts, “but that’s the truth.”

Gary seems flash but he’s not ostentatious. After watching him deliver a video “Does GDP Matter to Ordinary People?” in a striped, grey poncho, one friend of mine blurted out: “Fair play Gary, but what are you wearing?” At Citibank, he introduced a “Nando’s only” rule to brokers who kept trying to woo him with Michelin-star meals. His order remains the same — half chicken, peri-salted chips and macho peas. Later, he invites me to his birthday karaoke party. His song of choice is Sinatra’s “My Way” — I’m not surprised.

There’s a class problem in trading, Gary says, but his background helped him get one step ahead of his colleagues, who had become convinced that interest rates would increase after the 2008 crash. Confused, he went home to east London and asked friends why they weren’t spending, as his colleagues suggested they should be. Their answer was simple: “ . . . but Gary, we don’t have any money.” So where was all the money?

“2008 wasn’t an earthquake, it didn’t destroy the productive capacity of society,” Gary explains. “Everybody can’t be in debt . . . If everyone’s losing their assets, there has to be some group that is making a fucking fortune.” That was the super-rich.

Periods of economic hardship usually come couched in an insinuation that things will get better, but in the UK’s case Gary doesn’t think so. “If we don’t change the way that we structure our society and tax system, then the future of their lives, their kids’ lives, is going to be fucking awful.” In his view, economic analysts, particularly in the media, are a confederacy of dunces. Economists at universities and newspapers, he says, are paid to write “fancy papers” and “fancy articles”. Only traders are paid to be right, Gary says. However, ex-colleagues have described his analysis as preoccupied with asset price inflation over wider geopolitical factors. “He’s not saying anything new or insightful,” one told the banking jobs site eFinancialCareers.

This hasn’t stopped Gary from taking his message to the mainstream. Last year, he was invited on to the BBC’s Politics Live. Resembling a Leipzig techno DJ with his shaved head and black T-shirt, he sat glowering throughout. He kept returning to the same message: during the pandemic, the UK government gave out hundreds of billions, which has largely accumulated with the very rich because the proper analysis wasn’t done. He found the BBC’s reaction frustrating. “I was one of the best-paid economists in the entire fucking world . . . I’m turning up and you’re going to ask me about Love Island and Prince fucking Harry?”

Gary never imagined he had an obligation to society. He says he doesn’t give money to charity and, aside from investing in gold and property, funnels everything into his social media project. But he has solutions. He is a member of Patriotic Millionaires UK, a collective of wealthy Brits, and Millionaires for Humanity, where, alongside a Disney heiress, he advocates for a wealth tax.

Gary favours redistributing assets into the hands of working people, a policy often dismissed for being “anti-aspirational”. “Who’s being aspirational here?” he asks, “the person who wants working people to get fucking homes or the person saying they want to guarantee that work doesn’t pay.” Not all economists agree with his analysis. Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has ruled out a wealth tax if the party wins power: “The reason living standards have been so abysmal these last 13 years is not because taxes aren’t high enough,” she said.

He walks me towards the Docklands Light Railway, opened in 1987 to connect London’s financial districts. As a kid, he watched the skyscrapers rise on the horizon, promising a new life. Today, Canary Wharf seems almost two dimensional, every aspect built for function. But Gary was drawn to its sense of placelessness; it felt assailable. “This is new, anonymous, cultureless money,” he says, “and because of that, it’s to be won.”

Almost as soon as I turn my back, he’s gone.

A few stops from here trains arrive at Poplar or Limehouse, neighbourhoods supporting both Gary’s “Bankersville” flat and some of the UK’s highest child poverty levels. But even on the far end of the line, the distant lights of finance remain visible, especially after dark. You have to admit, there’s something hypnotic about them.

“The Trading Game”, by Gary Stevenson, is published by Allen Lane on March 5

Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first

Letter in response to this article:

It worked for the Normans but is now the great divide / From ADH Leishman, Belfast, UK