Trader
“You’re the Fire Brigade, but your job is not to put the fire out, it’s to work out which houses [will] burn down.”
Stevenson started his career as a trader at Citibank and in his book, The Trading Game, he describes the insidious nature of working for a bank. This is where he developed his theories about the impact of wealth inequality on the global economy. Every year he would bet on the worsening of the financial system, a strategy which he claims helped him to become “Citibank’s most profitable trader, in the whole world”.
The most depressing detail of working as a trader is that you are paid to identify problems, not fix them. Stevenson identifies this as a huge problem in economics – the smartest economists get jobs in banks, not civil service where they use their abilities to exploit the economic issues they find rather than to resolve them.
The claim to be Citibank’s most profitable trader is one of the most criticised parts of his personal brand. In 2024, the Financial Times published a piece interviewing Stevenson’s former colleagues, many of whom disputed it, calling it “an outlandish fib” and pointing out that he was never given the risk limits to come close to being the most profitable trader.
YouTuber
“What we’re trying to do on this channel [is] change the story about economics.”
Stevenson traded in his job at Citibank for one more public, a YouTube content creator.
Gary’s Economics poses as an educational YouTube channel. Stevenson, as the host, explains economic topics to the camera in a way that is accessible to most viewers. But once you watch a few of his videos, you see that he only comments on topics that tie in with his big message – wealth inequality.
His videos forecast the economic future as bleak, two of the more recent ones being ‘How to stop the economy from collapsing’ and ‘The week Trump nearly crashed the world economy’. But he usually ends with a positive message – we can fix this.
Stevenson doesn’t show support for any particular political party. He criticises both Labour and the Conservatives alike and says they are both missing policies that tackle wealth inequality.
Activist
In the UK in 2021, the top 10% owned 57% of wealth, up from 52.5% in 1995 – Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Stevenson believes wealth inequality is on the rise in most Western economies and is being driven by the compounding of wealth, which is when one’s wealth generates income, growing the overall fortune exponentially over time. Because resources in an economy are finite, it operates like a seesaw: as the wealth of one group rises (without significant economic growth), another’s must fall. Hence more for the richest means less for the least fortunate.
Moreover, he argues inequality has dramatically increased recently because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw a huge flow of wealth from public (government) to private hands – as reported in the World Inequality Report 2022. The depletion of wealth among the poorest and the government has left both groups impoverished and forced to take on debt. This, he warns, will lead to what he calls, ‘the shutting down of government’, where policy makers are forced to bring in austerity because of worsening finances.
While not committing directly to any economic policies, his slogan, ‘tax wealth not work’ implies that he wants the introduction of some form of wealth tax.
He is slightly unorthodox in that he focuses less on the egalitarian arguments and more on the economic imperatives. This protects his arguments from politics-of-envy dismissals. However, his reluctance to align himself with specific policies blunts his political impact and makes his viewpoint harder to quantify and debate. For example, many economists would argue against a wealth tax, especially a poorly planned one, and this is arguably why we don’t see it implemented in most Western economies today.
Leader
In his last posted video at the time of writing, called ‘Signing off: how close are we to winning higher taxes on the rich?’, Stevenson talks to his audience as a general would talk to his army, saying powerful statements like, “maybe we can win this”, and, “it’s going to depend on you and how many of you are willing and able to spread that message”.
That said, he isn’t Che Guevara. He concedes that the “big risk … to this movement [is] my mental health” and so he hopes more people will get involved; he can’t win this fight alone.
The arguments made by Stevenson are independent of him as a person. If people do not agree with him, they should debate the points, not the man. Stevenson offers an explanation for why the UK economy is failing – it’s up to you to decide whether to believe it.
