4 min read
Gary Stevenson grew up in Ilford, East London, in a working-class household, and by his own account was expelled from school as a teenager before turning his raw ability with numbers into a place at the London School of Economics in 2005. In 2007 he won a Citibank recruiting competition called The Trading Game, a card-based trading simulation, which led to an internship and then a full-time seat on Citibank's interest rate desk in 2008, just as the global financial crisis hit. By his own telling, he became the bank's most profitable trader, netting around $12 million in his first year alone.
What makes his story more than a finance-industry anecdote is the trade itself, and what he did after making it.
After the 2008 crisis, the consensus view among economists and rival trading desks was that interest rates would return to historical norms of 4-5% within a few years, once quantitative easing did its job and the economy recovered. Stevenson took the other side of that bet, repeatedly and for years.
His argument split the economy into two groups. Most households spend nearly everything they earn on essentials, so when wages stagnate they have nothing left to drive a spending-led recovery. Wealthy households, by contrast, cannot physically spend a windfall of that size on consumption, so the money central banks created flows into buying financial assets instead, real estate, stocks, bonds, pushing asset prices up without doing much for wages or spending.
If that diagnosis was right, rates would stay lower for longer than the market expected, again and again. Stevenson's positions were built on exactly that repeated mispricing, and by his account it made him Citibank's most profitable trader globally at 24.
Stevenson has described a growing unease with a job where his personal earnings were, in his own framing, a direct bet against ordinary households' financial recovery. He left Citibank in 2014, studied at Oxford, and eventually built a public platform, GarysEconomics, on YouTube and podcasts to make the argument outside a trading floor.
His central claim there is that modern inequality is mostly a wealth story, not an income one: what people own (property, equities, private businesses) matters more than what they're paid, because asset ownership compounds while wages have not kept pace. He points to housing specifically, arguing that as property increasingly functions as a speculative asset rather than shelter, rent and mortgage costs transfer wealth from younger, working households to older, wealthier ones.
Stevenson's proposed fix is a direct tax on net wealth above a high threshold, and in 2021 he was among roughly 30 UK millionaires who signed a public letter to then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak proposing a tax on wealth above £10 million. His 2024 memoir, The Trading Game, became a UK number one bestseller and was longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year.
Whichever side of that debate is right, the underlying distinction he draws, between income and accumulated wealth, is a useful one regardless of your politics. Central banks track exactly this split when setting policy: NetWort tracks the current policy rates and eight other macro indicators that shape whether cheap money flows toward wages or asset prices in the first place.
Stevenson's core observation, that most people track their paycheck closely but rarely track what they actually own versus what they owe, applies whether or not you agree with his tax proposal. Your net worth, not your income, is the number that actually reflects whether asset price movements are working for you or against you.