Gary Stevenson: The rich will bankrupt us all

In short

Podcast Episode Notes: Gary Stevenson: The Rich Will Bankrupt Us All

Episode Overview In this episode of "Making Money," hosts Damien Jordan and Timeyin Akerele welcome Gary Stevenson, a former city trader turned inequality economist and author of "The Trading Game: A Confession." Stevenson discusses his journey from profiting off growing wealth inequality to campaigning against it, emphasizing a need for significant systemic change to address the widening wealth gap.

Key Themes and Discussions

Background of Gary Stevenson
Early Life: Grew up in a poor family in Ilford, East London. Early experiences of financial insecurity motivated his interest in money.
Education: Attended the London School of Economics (LSE), where he became aware of the disparities in opportunities among peers.
Career in Trading: Became a top trader at Citibank during the financial crisis, profiting from betting on wealth inequality.

The Rise of Inequality
Current Situation: Stevenson argues that wealth inequality in the UK is escalating rapidly, drawing parallels with conditions in countries like Nigeria and Brazil.
Impact of COVID-19: The pandemic exacerbated existing inequalities, leading to massive wealth accumulation among the rich while the majority face economic hardships.

The Economic System and Power Dynamics
Understanding the System: Stevenson emphasizes the importance of understanding the economic system, stating it fundamentally influences wealth generation.
Wealth Redistribution: He asserts that current trends are leading to a de facto redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the super-rich, warning that without intervention, the middle class will be bankrupted.

Taxation and Policy Recommendations
Taxing the Rich: Stevenson advocates for a wealth tax on individuals with over £10 million in net worth to address the inequality crisis.
Public Support for Taxation: He discusses the need for societal support for taxing the wealthy, arguing that many are unaware of the true extent of wealth held by the richest citizens.

The Role of Education and Awareness
Financial Literacy: Highlights the necessity for financial education to empower individuals to understand and advocate for their rights.
Campaigning for Change: Stevenson encourages listeners to unite and demand policy changes that would protect the financial interests of the majority.

The Future Outlook
Potential for Improvement: Despite the grim outlook, Stevenson believes that wealth inequality can be reversed if the masses recognize their collective power and act together.
Call to Action: Emphasizes the urgency of addressing inequality to prevent societal collapse and improve living standards for all.

Key Takeaways

Personal Responsibility vs. Systemic Issues: While individual effort is important, systemic barriers are major contributors to financial disparity.
Collective Action Needed: The only way to address wealth inequality is through collective recognition and action among ordinary people.
Understanding Wealth: A clear understanding of wealth distribution and the dynamics of power is essential for enacting change.

Closing Thoughts Gary Stevenson’s insights offer a candid look at the current economic landscape in the UK, emphasizing the necessity for systemic change to combat rising inequality. His call for a wealth tax and increased awareness around economic issues aims to galvanize listeners toward action.

Resources

Order Gary’s Book: [The Trading Game: A Confession](https://amzn.to/3SJGXeM)
Support Tax Justice UK: A platform advocating for fair tax systems and policies.
Financial Advising Services: Available through Making Money’s platform.

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Transcript

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0:01You know what I love, Damo? Things that save me time. You don't have YouTube Premium, mate, so I just don't believe that. Granted, I'll give you that one. However, I've got one for you. A great time saver in personal finance is Money Week magazine. They spend a lot of time distilling the biggest stories in personal finance down into consumable chunks, so you don't have to scroll and scroll. They give practical tips on savings, investments, pensions, the UK economy, the global economy. It's like your five a day, but for finance. If you want to give Money Week a try, you can get six issues in print and the app absolutely free by visiting moneyweek.com forward slash money.

0:34After your trial, you'll save an extra£5 a quarter on the subscription, which is exclusive to Making Money listeners. And that's moneyweek.com forward slash money. But there's a link in the description if you just want to click that. Hello, just wanted to give you a quick heads up about today's episode. Gary gets quite passionate at points and there's a fair bit of swearing from his side in this episode. We just wanted to let you know if you've got any little ones around that this might not be a good episode to play in their earshot. Hope you enjoy it all the same.

1:02My job was to look at the economy and understand what's happening. And I was adjudged to be one of the best people in the world at that. Inequality is rising extremely quickly here in this country. If we do not prevent that from rising, we will see the kind of living standards here that are common in places like Nigeria, places like Brazil. Gary Stevenson is a former city trader who made millions from betting on growing inequality in the debt crisis. With his YouTube channel Gary's Economics, he now campaigns to end the very thing he made money from. And he's written a book called The Trading Game about his experiences in finance.

1:37Understanding the economic system we're in is important. In many ways, it defines how much money you can make. And Gary spends a lot of time thinking about where our economy is heading. That's why we've got him on today. The middle class, ordinary property owners and the government are getting bankrupted. and where is that wealth going? Who is that debt to? The super rich. I want people who work and who study and who do good work and to be able to live good lives and we are not providing that.

2:08So today we're joined by Gary Stevenson, former city trader, inequality economist and author of The Trading Game. Honestly, this is, so my audience tell me who they want me to sit down with. This is the most requested conversation. Okay. No pressure. No worries. I think people just, I think your message, which we'll get into has kind of really resonated with people in recent times because there's not many people like yourself that have done the things that you have done that have come out and maybe vocalized what people feel. And I think that's why the YouTube channel grew so quickly and why so many people have wanted this conversation to have.

2:43Not everyone's going to know you. So I want to start with your background because I think that's really important context for kind of why you are the way you are now. Yeah. So in the book, you talk about your childhood and the importance of money and how things weren't necessarily easy. Can we just start there? Yeah. So I come from a place called Ilford, which is in East London. I grew up in a pretty poor family next to the railway, you know, five people in a small little house. and it was funny you know the story I tell in the book is I remember I don't know how old I was but it's like one of my earliest memories I remember my parents sending me to the Esso garage with like a pound to buy lemonade one of those big like two litre lemonade bottles and at some point I dropped that pound and I remember just like panic and like looking under every car looking putting my hands down the drains and it felt like I was looking for that pound for like an hour going home in like floods tears and I think I was talking to my literary agent the other day about my paper round that I used to do and how I used to work 364 days a year every day except Christmas for 13 pounds a week and then he cut it down to 12 pounds a week and I think that was I was just super aware as a kid that not just that I didn't have any money but that my family didn't have any money, that my parents didn't have any money, that money was a constant problem for them, for their lives.

4:15And I never wanted to ask for anything from them. I wanted to, I wanted to make money myself. And yeah, obviously you read the book. I did make money myself, but I think, you know, and we can talk more about this later if you like, but I think there's a degree to which it became basically an obsession, maybe an unhealthy obsession. We're very similar. We could, like, I think we show a lot of similarities. The difference is you became hyper successful and I meant this guy. You know what I mean? They were just saying, but no, but yeah, I do okay. But what I mean is I relate to that. Like my mom provided everything, but I was aware that more money would have fixed certain problems in the life.

4:49And that led to like my lifelong obsession with money, you know, in a similar way. We did similar things at uni as well. We'll get to that. But you grew up in the shadow of the city, didn't you? And that kind of influenced you from an early age. Yeah, well, they went up. you can see you can see the the skyscrapers of canary war from milford it's not like right next to it but you can see them and they went up i think the first one the big sort of pyramid one went up when i was maybe eight or nine and i remember giving like a little talk in school about it and people said oh you can go out on the roof and you can walk around which i don't you can do nowadays but um we saw them go up on the horizon as a kid you know i mean um and I think I was very very good at maths at school yeah so I think like you see them go up and you just think like well that's you know it's banks and you know you don't know what bank is but you know banks you know there's some money over there it's like yeah that's where I'm gonna go I'm gonna go I'm gonna work in one of them towers you feel like it's you feel like it's hours and I feel like you know I don't know where you guys are from but like you see them skyscrapers go up in the city that you are you're born in and you kind of feel like they're ours but it's funny because the truth is most kids that grow up in east london will never get a chance to work in those skyscrapers yeah how old were you when you dropped the pound and like when you started having this obsession with money because you know they say that in the first seven years that's when you kind of it affects your attitude and your perspective towards money do you remember how old you were i mean that is such an old memory now it's like a memory of a memory i would guess i was something like seven or eight but like so i don't know what the legal age you're allowed to start working their paper and is i think it might be 13 it might be 12 when we were kids you could be younger with the paper i remember people getting paid 50p a day for paper out big like paper rounds well i mean that's not much less than i used to do basically but um i remember like let's say it was 13 i think it was 13 i remember like counting down like when i'm 13 i'm going to get a paper round and it's like 13 pounds a week it's like it's nothing but for me it was everything and i I would save it up.

6:53I would save those 13 pounds up, you know, 10 weeks to buy a pair of TNs, you know what I mean? And it's weird in a way because now as an adult, I'm not really particularly materialistic person. And, but as a kid, I was obsessed with money, almost in an abstract concept. We talk about if we had money, we could have this, we could have that. I never really had an idea. If I had money, we could have this, we could have that. It was kind of like we would be released from this sense of insecurity, really. If we fast forward a bit, you ended up at the London School of Economics, didn't you, which you call like a bootcamp for banking.

7:22for getting into finance. And I like your story because throughout it, there's examples of inequality, unfair advantage that ultimately become your kind of like life's work. So one thing that resonated with me, I went to Durham. So similar, I did like finance at Durham. I went to Durham as someone from inner city Birmingham where I was the only member of my family to ever go to university. I got there and I thought, I'll just go, I'll get a job at Goldman. and then within like six months I realised oh my god there's all this other work that I should have done before I should have already had an internship basically by the day I walked in I was never getting that job because all my peers had already done internships the year before they had summer grads and it was like this other language and you say the exact same thing about the LSE guys were speaking a language I just thought if I do math I'll get the job it's what you're told isn't it it's what you're told as a kid you know like I you know I was very very good at maths at school i was i was a bright kid i was good at most subjects to be honest and the teachers just like you know work hard work hard study hard and you're gonna make it and you you believe that that's the story we're told and then i got to lse and um first year was like just quite chill i study maths and economics i do my maths i do my economics hard degree that oh yeah i'm good at maths so for me it wasn't actually that hard to be honest like i was just that is it's got a reputation at lse for being a hard degree um you know i was just banging through at first year and I did pretty well and then I come in second year and then suddenly like everybody's starting wearing suits start wearing suits people start wearing suits and then everybody's talking about CDS's and MBA and CDO and sales and trading and you know what I mean all this it's all these three letter acronyms you don't know what they mean and you're like what is going on and then I asked one of my mates and he was like yeah second year's internship year and I was like yeah the fuck is internship year and he's like you've got he's like how many internships if you apply I'm like you know what is an internship he's like he couldn't couldn't believe it you know what I mean and he's like you know you need to apply for 30 internships and I was like I couldn't probably even name you 30 banks even now to be honest you know you need to apply for 30 internships and like CV cover letter CV cover letter and then that's when I realized this thing right all these guys had been being prepped by their families from like four years all these guys had like trepped through the Sahara Desert for the junior united and they they'd all like played the fucking oboe at the Royal Albert Hall.

9:48While I was fluffing pillows at DFS for 40 pound a day. And I was like, I thought you study hard, you work hard, you get the grades, you get the job. And then I realized already by that point, I'd kind of already lost. Like there was basically no chance because we were all gonna, you know, I can get a first, but you know, 20 % of the cohort is gonna get a first and they've all got this back story. And only 5 % are getting the top job. Yeah, and you know, of course, that's not even talking about people who know people, people whose dad worked for Goldman Sachs. You know what I mean? When you go to LSE, and I'm sure it's the same at Durham, there's a lot of them going around.

10:20I didn't even realise that, you know, this is going to sound super naive for someone who's a finance professional. I didn't even realise that investment banking was the kind of job that I could get, because I grew up in Birmingham. There's no skyscrapers there. There's the ball ring. So that to me wasn't like, if I go to Durham, I could end up at Goldman. I didn't even realise that that was a thing until year two. And by then you'd missed it. This is why with your story, there's like this poetic irony of, you actually got into that world through an unfair advantage because you played this trading game and you knew the rules before other people.

10:50And I thought there's like some beautifulness in that. Yeah, it's such a mad story. So like, I was just like, fuck this, like, I can't win this game. There's no way. Like, how is my CV cover letter going to stand out from all these guys who've done all this mad shit that they've been prepped for from young? You know, when I was a teenager, I did a paper round. I was working for DFS Which is a sofa shop For those who don't know And I was trying to become A grime MC That's what I was doing You know what I mean Nice That's not going to work On the CV cover So I was like fuck it But I knew When it comes to maths and economics Because I was I knew that I was the guy for that I could match anyone So I was like I'm just going to just Just be as aggressive In the lectures as I can To be like look This guy knows something And I was sitting in the library one day Doing my homework LSE library It's this big open Modern library Some guy come up to me I've never even seen him before.

11:43This like lanky guy from Grimsby. And he said to me, are you Gary Stephenson? I was like, yeah. He was like, listen, City Bank hire one trader a year through a card game, which is basically a maths game. And like, I heard you're pretty good at maths. So like you should enter this game. Why do you think he did that for you? Well, I know I can tell you why, because you know, through this, I got the internship at City and City Bank pay some of the interns that they offer the job to find good grads. Yeah, good grads. A lot of companies did that. They did it to me the next year. So this guy had been paid by Citibank, like find us some good kids at LSE.

12:18So he come in and he told me the rules of this game. And I was, then he just walked off, this guy. And I was like, this is the kind of thing that happens at LSE. Yeah, and I was just like, and I knew straight away, well, I didn't know for certain, but I had this feeling I'm going to win that game. because I'd been so frustrated by the unfairness of the recruitment process, which I'd basically, I knew I was smarter than those guys at LSE. You know, I killed those exams. You know, secondary, I come like first in the uni, like every exam, basically. I knew I was, but then you're blocked out, basically because of where you come from.

12:53They call it polish. Yeah. You're not polished, which means you're from a poor background or you're not a white male that's like privately school educated. It's a block. It's not fair. And then suddenly this guy's come in and he's like okay it's a game it's a game you know and like you know you could be fucking prince william you go into that game card game you know i mean you know if we're gonna play each other fucking age of empires it don't matter who your dad is you know i mean yeah and you know i used to love games i still do you know i can't play them that much nowadays but like i loved games as a kid and i was like banging maths game this is it and i couldn't believe this other door and what's interesting about that is my whole life I've been kind of looking for these things because like when I was a kid obviously I've written a book now you know and I think the book is pretty good I think I'm a good writer I was good at writing when I was a kid you're good I was like fuck English we're doing maths because maths you can't tell me it's bad the answer's right I'll put every single answer on that is every single answer on exam is right I mean and then trading is the same you know I've been in the media now making the right fucking predictions for three years most people don't fucking notice on the trading floor i was the fucking man because everybody knows it doesn't matter what he talks yeah yeah so like i like these spaces listen we live in a very unfair society but every now and again these little spaces pop up so i won that competition you had an unfair advantage i was like you know what i know it wasn't fair i knew the rules they didn't know the rules but the fact is those guys in that room those guys study lse they know a lot of fucking rules i'll never know so you know what fuck it i'll take the games that i get i'll take that you know you get given a good hand you play it and you know most people get you know i got a lot of band hands and i took the one that i got you know what else can you do no and i think like i just thought it was a nice moment that you got that you you took it and then that leads you into into the role and you basically become one of the the top traders don't you or the top trader for a two-year period and you describe how you made more money in those few years enough to set you up for life basically can you can you describe what that that means like top trader lots of money i mean as you say like it's enough money that i don't have to and i haven't worked since i haven't worked so i was city bank's top trader 2011 i started working full-time 2008 so june 2008 just for the crisis um and i watched like it's a mad place to trade it's an absolutely insane place and um because it's such a hard job to get I assumed that we were full of like really smart people and there are some smart people on the trading floor but the truth is from my experience and you know if you read the book you'll see this most of the people that I worked here on the trading floor number one were not particularly smart but number two were just completely insane just absolute maniacs yeah just insane insane it's hilarious in a way But you know, there's one story in the book about a guy who, he took me out drinking.

15:50He was much older than me, you know. Took me out drinking and I drank so much that I threw up at work the next day. And the boss sort of said to him, Gary said that was your fault. I came in early the next day and boss said to him, Gary said it was your fault. And this guy, he just sits there and I hear him, like side of my, I hear him growling. Just, just, and then I think, what the fuck? And I just try and ignore it. And then he starts growling louder and louder. and I just like ignore it, ignore it. And then he just like bang. And he's kicked. There's these doors down the bottom that I like block off the computers.

16:22He's kicked it, bam. He slammed his fist down the desk going like, what the fuck? And then he started like, like gnashing his teeth at me like a fucking... Growling at you. Like a doberman. And I was just like, I could, but that's just one of, you know, a million stories I could tell you. I couldn't believe these insane... And they're getting paid a million pounds a year. You know what I mean? I didn't know that at first. you know what I mean but um you go into this space and I mean LSE was like this to a lesser degree you think that these elite spaces are full of like fucking smart people but like from my experience they're just full of completely insane people and I was like that was mad but it was also like fuck me I can have this like if this is the fucking competition present company not included I feel social media is a bit like that and YouTube because I think there's a lot of yeah there's a lot of arrogance around people that put themselves forward.

17:17I thought that I would come into the finance space and I would, I'd be surrounded by highly capable, really intelligent people. Actually, there's a lot of ego and there's a lot of people chatting a lot of rubbish. I always, I don't want to like push my YouTube all the time. Predictions, predictions, predictions, predictions. Listen, I was the best trader in the fucking world, one of the biggest banks in the world, because I make predictions that are fucking right. And I could walk out here right now and walk into a skyscraper in Canary Wharf and they pay me two million pounds a year because I'm fucking right when I make my predictions.

17:44So I'm make predict because i know there's a lot of bullshits out there but it's not easy to make predictions that are right so i'm dropping them all the time you talk about um like we'll come back to your story in a second but while we're on this topic you talk about economists and the incentives that exist and these points around predictions and your video was around why your economists are bad i believe and you know you spoke about how the best talent basically is hidden away making millions yeah so for me there's a two-part problem that we have in the way we build economics in our society number one is if you're really really good you can get paid a fucking ton of money to work for a bank like literally two million pound a year if you're really good and you know i was getting paid that when i was like 24 you know i'm like you could get paid i probably could be getting paid way more than that if i stayed in it right um so that's number one so there's this massive like magnet pulling anyone who is good out of you know where society kind of needs them government academia you know media civil service where your society needs the good economists and number two when you are in places like academia or like media there's no real good way if you are good to to really clearly demonstrate that so you know i was i went to work for city bank nobody from nowhere you know i mean little kid from ilford basically within two three years he's the fucking guy he is the fucking guy he manages the money he makes the decisions he's the fucking guy everybody knows your name because you come out and you say bam everyone's wrong this is the prediction everybody sees after you you're the guy who was right and you do that again and again and again and you're the fucking guy I went to Oxford to do a master's when did I start six years ago I walked in there you know one of the most successful interest rate traders in the world and I said to the professors who are lecturing on interest rates can we talk about why You know, your predictions have been wrong for 10 years in a row.

19:37Guy said to me, what do you mean? You always knew interest rates would stay zero. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. This guy, you know, after the financial crisis, everybody predicted zero would stay, it would not be permanent every single year. And he didn't even know it happened. These guys are so bad. They don't even know that they're bad. And I can walk in and say, okay, well, I've been right for 10 years in a row. So can I get the fucking mic now? They don't give a shit. I think you said in your Guardian interview that the best advice you got was to throw away your economics textbooks.

20:12Can you explain that a little bit? Like, why would you say? Yeah, so this is like a big moment in my life. And I think it's like described really nice in the book. But so basically I started working full-time 2008, mid-2008. 2009, I had like a massive year. Like my area that I worked in became super profitable. As the world was collapsing, right? Yeah, yeah. Because what we did is make short-term collateralized loans. and you know it's described in detail in the book but basically everybody needed money like short term loans and we were the guys who had it especially dollars and we were an american bank so we started making a ton of money and i was just like fucking i'm getting in here and like so i made quite a lot of money in my first year which is like pretty unprecedented but there was so much shit going on nobody really noticed so 2009 i had like a pretty good year for a first year trader and i was i made much more money than i had expected to make and i was like okay we can make a lot of money here 2010 i was like i'm gonna go for i'm gonna hit it and I started doing these big bets on Swiss interest rates and this crazy thing happened with the Swiss National Bank briefly cut interest rates to negative 4.5 % effectively and I got fucking steamrolled and I lost$8 million in a week for the bank and you know I dropping that quid yeah exactly where is it I remember at one point during that my flatmate invited some of my mates around to like you know play Pro Evo and eat pizza and they were just like, oh, you know, team you're going to play as, blah, blah, blah.

21:32And I'm just thinking, I just fucking lost$6 million. You know what I mean? It's kind of shocking. But then after that, like my instinct, you know, I studied maths and economics, you know, I was like, you know, go back to the books, fucking studying. I started to bring my books into the office and I was reading my books on a desk and I was very, very lucky at Citibank. There was one guy I worked with, come from Liverpool, never went to university, started working as a cashier at Halifax and over the course of like 30 years, Built his way up to being like One of the top traders at CBank And he's you know In a sense from a similar background to me Like working class guy Although he didn't go to university He saw me reading those books Like one day And it was two days The third day he just come up to me Smashed the books out of my hand And he was like listen mate Where do you fucking think you are This is like a fucking library You know what I mean It's not fucking Jack and Ori Listen you're not a fucking kid anymore right You're not going to find the answers To what's happening in those fucking books If you want to know about the economy Go home and ask your fucking mum what a financial situation is like.

22:30You know what I mean? Look at the adverts on the fucking tube. Walk down the fucking high street. Ask your friends, ask your friends' parents what is going on in their financial lives. You need to understand people and their financial lives in order to understand the economy. And I describe it in the book as the most important thing I ever heard, really, because I think, you know, what I achieved later in my career and, you know, I think the understanding that I have now is basically entirely from this understanding that the truth is economists nowadays, the vast majority of them, the ones who study university, are hugely detached from the real world.

23:04And they're obsessed with these very complicated mathematical ideas, which are not always useless. But if you're not talking to people, you know, they all come from fucking rich backgrounds. They don't know anybody in the ordinary world. You know what I mean? The only people they know on ordinary incomes, they're fucking cleaners. You know what I mean? So how are these guys going to understand it? And I realized this is it. this is my fucking in because I'm the only guy in this fucking trading floor who knows that side that knows this side I know I can fucking go I fucking these guys live on my fucking street you know I mean I can find out what people's ordinary financial situations are like and nobody else here knows it and I think since then really ever since then all I've been doing is finding them gaps between what the theorists think and what's really happening because in those gaps as a trader that's where you make the money.

23:56You make money in understanding what it is that people don't understand because that's when the prices are wrong. That is when the prices are wrong. So that bet to you was, you summarise it as, I bet that inequality would continue to get worse. What you were doing, you were betting on interest rates, right? So can you just flesh that out for people in a way that they could understand? Yeah, so my big thing I realised is like, after the financial crisis, and the same in COVID actually, like the the systemic response government central bank was slash interest rates do qe essentially for the listeners who might not know qe is quantitative easing yeah quantitative easing yeah basically print a ton of money and lend it out and the idea is you can borrow money cheaply we're going to borrow a load of money we're going to go on holiday business is going to invest we're not going to save because we can't get no fucking interest on it that's the idea and it's supposed the boost the economy you stay finance you know this right this is the idea and then like i went and i asked my fucking mates you know you know what's why don't you spend more money you know i mean which is essentially the question after 2008 why you know why didn't people spend more money and you can fucking imagine what people people would laugh at you that you know i don't spend no money because i don't have any fucking money and you you know you dig into the details and You're like, well, my mum, you know, sold her house and she's renting now, you know, and I'm sleeping on a sofa trying to save up money.

25:22You know what I mean? To buy a house, but the prices are going up. Or somebody else is like, well, you know, my mum's mortgage expired, but, you know, she's not able to work now. So the rate's gone up to fucking 6%. You know, I can't do anything. I spoke to my flatmate. My flatmate showed me his shoes. there were fucking holes in his shoes and he said to me why do you think i don't spend more fucking money and it was like i realized like it's not it's not fucking what it's not getting to the people that need it right you know these are the guys who would fucking spend it if they got it and they're not fucking getting it and who's fucking getting it well i didn't have to fucking look very far right i'm working on a team of fucking 10 millionaires these guys are stacking in cash and what do they do with it they're buying fucking houses whose fucking house they're buying my mate's fucking mum's fucking house renting it to my mate's fucking mum's kids you know i mean you know the money only goes to the rich then all it does is push house prices up it does nothing to boost the economy and then and but then you could there's a cyclical nature to it right because if the money goes to the rich and the rich use that money to buy the houses from the middle class well then the middle class don't have their fucking houses and they have to pay more rent you know i mean which means they get poorer which means they're paying more rent to the rich which means the rich can buy ever more people's fucking houses and you start to see this is going to get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse that's the fucking trade do you think this is only in the uk or it's around i mean obviously you specialize in the uk but is it around the world absolutely global and in fact the big bet i was doing was on the us you know i was i did bet on the uk quite a lot but i bet more on the us because we had like a legendary sterling trader i was letting him do the uk stuff i was like i was betting on the us i bet on the uk as well it's absolutely fucking global and this is the thing which frustrates me quite a lot listen I know there's a lot of problems in the UK I fucking know this is where I was born this is where I was raised you know I see it you all know it there's a lot of problems here I speak to people all over the world and they say to me like the problem is specific to where I'm from everybody thinks and it's you know as somebody who wants to stop this problem it worries me it's worse in some places than others but this is this is a systemic problem I ask in Nigeria it's definitely been going on for like a long my family's Nigerian it's been going on for a long time and I imagine it's been going on in America as well so I'm like it's a probably around the world problem.

27:35Yeah, it's massively global. It's massively global. And I mean, you know, if you're from Nigeria and you've got exposure to what things are like in Nigeria, then, you know, you will know the reality of what very, very unequal economies look like. Yeah. You know what I mean? You have some of my friends in Nigeria, they're getting like G-Wagon, gold G-Wagons for their birthday when they like turned 18, 20. And then there were like servants who were like, they can't feed their kids. So they have to live in like a house in the big, like the big house and then they've got a little servant's house and like they're struggling and you've got to help them get their kids to school and yeah.

28:06The rich people in poor countries are fucking rich and that is because poor countries are in almost every case massively unequal countries. But I think that the hardest thing about the UK so as an example with you talking to family and friends and seeing the reality on the ground I had a similar kind of awakening where it was I'd gone to uni I'd understood the markets I saw the crash and I started to invest and then say fast forward five ten years later everyone is going the biggest bull run in history more wealth generated over since the financial crisis to now from the stock market i go to my mom and she's like i don't trust stocks i'm not involved in that yeah and the narrative is that everyone's got rich and actually no one's participated in that bull run and it's like where's all that money gone and i remember thinking then the message i'm being told by the media is like everyone's having a great time whereas actually wages have stayed stagnant over that period so my mom's real income has gone backwards she's not participated in the biggest wealth generation event.

29:03She's missed out on it. She actually doesn't trust it. There's this frustrating, like, equivalising in the media, like, stock markets are up. Everyone's better off. Yeah. Like, you know, a huge number of people ain't got no fucking stock. People can't pay their heating bills. They're not going to be buying stocks. yeah. It's a similar thing with house prices. And of course, like, house ownership is more broad, but, you know, you're 25 years old, you don't have a house, your parents don't have a house. House prices go up. Fucking, your stomach is sinking there. You know what I mean? Like, these, this big, changes in the financial environment in the last 20 years is this massive increase in all asset prices and really all that does is it cements the inequality between people who own wealth who own assets and people who don't but is that their fault like the wealth holders yeah no no 100 % i don't point i don't point fingers at individual wealth holders i don't point fingers at individual householders you know i am a wealthy person you know i mean if i were to say this is the thought of all wealthy people you know what am i gonna go do jump off a cliff listen this is our fault as a society we need to fix this as a society i don't think we get anywhere by pointing fingers you know you know i can point the finger at rishi sunak as much i want to say oh it's your fault it's boris that don't get us nowhere that don't get us nowhere the truth of the matter is increasingly ordinary families in this country can't fucking heat their fucking homes in the winter and that's you know i reckon there's 50 of this country now that are worried about food and heat.

30:28And that number's increasing, okay? It's not the time to be deciding who the villain is. You know what I mean? You know, if your car's driving off the cliff, you don't turn around and start calling each other a dickhead. You fucking turn that wheel. Yeah. And that's what I'm trying to do. We were saying, this is your fault. But yeah, you know, I do what I do because I want to fix it, you know. How can we fix it then? Can we get into this? You need to, so, I get people on my channel sometimes say, oh, this guy's a communist because he wants to redistribute, okay? I am not the one trying to redistribute.

31:01The redistribution is fucking happening, okay? The middle class, ordinary property owners and the government are fucking getting bankrupted. And where is that wealth going? Who is that debt to? The super rich. It's happening. It's happening. COVID saw the biggest and fastest ever increasing wealth of millionaires and billionaires in the history of this country. Just get your head around that. So during the period of time, when living standards have had their fastest fall since the second world war, simultaneously, you've had the biggest and fastest ever increase in wealth of millionaires and billionaires.

31:36And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense, right? Because if you pause the economy, and in that two, three years where you pause the economy, you massively increase inequality, what you fucking expect is going to happen when you're on pause? Of course, you know, inequality is way higher now. And the reality of the economy has to shift. If inequality is higher, the rich get more you get less the redistribution is happening it's happening and that means that means you don't have a house that means you have to pay more rent you know i mean that means you have higher debt which means you have to pay more interest which means it's even harder to catch up so the redistribution is happening in front of our eyes i'm saying stop it i'm saying stop it we have to you know i don't say tax the rich because i hate rich people i fucking am a fucking rich person i say tax the rich because if we don't tax the rich then they will take all of the wealth of the middle class and the government.

32:26The government will be bankrupted, no fucking NHS, no fucking free schooling and the middle class will be bankrupted. And I think, you know, you've got links to Nigeria, right? You know what's going on there, right? I think a lot of people in this country naively assume that the kind of living standards that are seen in a place like Nigeria cannot happen here. Go and read fucking Charles Dickens. You know what I mean? Go read fucking Oliver Twist. It fucking happened. It fucking happened and it can happen again. Listen, hugely unequal countries have extremely low living standards. Inequality is rising extremely quickly here in this country.

32:59If we do not prevent that from rising, we will see the kind of living standards here that are common in places like Nigeria and places like Brazil. To counter that, I'm only playing devil's advocate. I got you on the podcast because I like your message. I know the comments are like, this guy. Many economists or much data would say as a wider global trend have living standards improved. over the last 20, 30 years. And I think there's, they probably have, apart from over the last 24 months where they've collapsed again. Well, listen, I don't want to shit on boomers, right? My dad worked for the post office for 35 years, okay?

33:34No university degree. My mum was largely a stay-at-home mum. She did a bit of child-minding. You know what I mean? They're not educated people, you know? Of course, I love my parents. They don't have no special talents, right? On that, they managed to raise three kids. They own their own property now. They live in comfortable retirement. You know, they moved down to Sussex. is that possible now for two people? Mother staying at home, father not going to university. Better off in retirement than they were when they were working. So like, I think, don't get me wrong. I think the big picture true situation is most of history, most of the world, living standards for most people are shit.

34:12We had a period of time, largely in the West, it wasn't international, Europe, North America, someplace like Japan, Australia, 50s, 60s, particularly 70s, 80s 90s early noughties where ordinary people were living decent lives decent homes decent car take a holiday here and there i'm not saying it was luxury i think the truth is the last 20 years especially the last 15 years has been a story of us slowly and increasingly quickly losing that so do you think we're at the top of the hill we've we've got all the games probably 20 years ago if i'm being honest i think that living standards have of course some things have improved we have the internet we've got wikipedia i fucking love wikipedia you know what i mean but you know i I think most young people you speak to would rather have a fucking house.

34:54There's two places you can live in the world now, a place where you can't afford the house and a place where you can't get a decent job. So I mean - You could go to Newcastle and houses are cheap, but the work employment - Yeah, the salary is low, so it's not there. It all matches, it's all relative. I talk about life at the 50th percentile. You're like bog standard person in the middle, exactly average life. The truth is that life in the UK 20 years ago, I'm not saying it was luxury, but there was comfort there. And there was a level of security there. Honestly now, at the 50th percentile now, they struggle.

35:25100%. I earn good money with my partner and I still felt the energy bill going up to 400 quid. And we're earning about an amount of money that is like well above average. And I'm thinking if the average is in the median, the mean, whatever average you want to take, put me on that income and plonk me in my life, I wouldn't, I couldn't live. There would have to be a serious downgrade in the quality of life. We all watch The Simpsons. well I don't know if you might be a bit too serious I'm familiar with Homer there was like a meme and it said like the Simpsons in 19 1917 he was just like a minimum wage guy working in a power plant and he's got like a two three bedroom house and his wife was just a stay-at-home mom that that dream is not possible in America like today and I don't think many ordinary people will disagree with you there you know I think some old older people they get some messages in the media you're like, things are getting better.

36:15Yeah. But I think you talk to anybody under 40, but I don't think they really believe things have been getting better. No. Last time we recorded, Tamein, you were having some real dramas with your accountant. So how's that been going, mate? They're sacked. So drama sorted. They're a big corporate firm. They didn't really reply to my emails very quickly. Like took a week or two at times. And they charged me way too much. I mean, I've got pretty simple taxes and yeah, they were charging me thousands. They saved me some money, but yeah, I had to move on. Slow and expensive. Pretty much, yeah. This is one of the reasons that we're really happy to be partnering with TaxApp.

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37:21If you need to file a self-assessment this year, give TaxApp a try. We've left a link in the description and use the code MONEY10 for 10 % off your first tax filing. That code is MONEY, M-O-N-E-Y 1-0. So, Mr. O 'Carolet, I hear you are a salesman. Elite salesman, yes. One of the best, they say? I've got a little bit of experience in the game, yeah, I could say. You've done a few deals. Bill, Bill. What would your compliance team say about you? They would say that I am always nagging them and that essentially I just have beef with compliance. I love the team. Compliance slows down all my deals because every time I get to the finish line, they've got to check documents, KYC, GDPR, and it's just a nightmare.

38:05It slows the deal down by like two, three weeks. It's always on both sides as well, isn't it? Sometimes it can be blocked on the other side. Well, that's where today's sponsor can help. Indeed. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get secure and compliant fast. And they stay that way. They do it by automating compliance with over 35 security and privacy frameworks like SOC2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA. Yeah, all of them. And this saves businesses so much time and money. According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers save over half a million dollars a year in costs. Not bad. And they also help you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster, which is great because everybody hates filling out forms.

38:42If you're a business that needs to prove security and compliance, visit Vanta.com forward slash making money to sign up for a completely free demo today. That's Vanta.com forward slash making money. There's a link in the description though, so you can just click that. So let's talk about taxing the rich then. So there's this thing I read, the wealth inequality report, and they proposed a wealth tax. And they basically said, if we tax anyone with more than half a million quid, and we tax them a rate of 5 % and we take 1 % a year, we'd raise 250 billion. Problem solved. Well, a lot of problems solved anyway.

39:17The problem of that is the majority of that wealth is in homes and pensions. And it's like what you're saying, it's like the boomers, right? The boomers have stepped onto the economy at the right time and through no fault of their own, they rode a lot of positive headwinds, right? But how can you then say to those people they're wealthy? Because most of them will say, I'm not, it's my pension it's my home I can't access that you know yeah you know I don't normally campaign for things like wealth taxes above things like what was the number that you mentioned half a million they said 80 billion if it was above 2 million a person so is that the kind of level you're thinking or the reason I don't push for things like that is not just because they're unpopular but as somebody who's looked into these things a lot what I see often happen is governments bringing taxes at certain times that I think will be popular.

40:10And then behind the scenes, they sneak in these exemptions that apply to the very rich. And the best example I have is, maybe it was about 10 years ago, here in the UK, they brought in the second home additional stamp duty, which you're probably aware of. And there is an exemption in that law for people who buy seven or more properties at once. And do you know who immediately went and bought seven properties? jeremy hunt our current chancellor so the reason why i don't push for things like wealth taxes on on levels like half a million is because a lot of people in this country have half million pound in wealth nowadays because of the value of property um you don't need to be super rich to have half a million pounds of course there are many who don't have that the people who are increasingly taking all of the wealth of society are not those guys on half a million is they're very rich and those guys have good accounts they have good lawyers they have good connections they can pressure politicians and in many cases they are politicians rishi sunak is worth over 700 million pounds his father annoys one of the richest men in the world they can put a loophole to exempt themselves all right where is the wealth going where is the wealth that was held by the middle class and the government going to the very rich they are the threat the people who are coming and taking your home are the threat so we need to stop them accumulating wealth so i talk about levels above 10 million because i think that is you know if you have more than 10 million pounds you are very very rich and of course there's a there's a massive difference between someone who has 10 million and someone who has like roughly 700 million but the truth is if you have 10 million pounds you are undisputably very very rich um it's the very rich that are the risk to middle-class living standards the most important thing for me is that you get that you that you neutralize the threat you know the fish rots from the head down it is the very rich that are taking our stuff we need to stop it and how do you do that then have you got like any practical ways or how would you do it if you were the prime minister when i hear that question i always immediately in my head split into two parts which is one technically how do you stop the very rich from taking all the assets yeah and number two politically how do you get support for it because the truth is at the moment i campaign for wealth taxes above 10 million right we're not going to get that and what i'm campaigning for is a wealth tax of one percent above 10 million right now you will know wealthy people frequently get three four five percent a year on their assets maybe more right so if i was to tax them one percent it wouldn't even stop them from growing their wealth so it wouldn't even fix the problem it would only slow the problem down we're not getting it because there's no political support for it the labor party is not in any way supporting taxation on wealth because they think it's not popular you know and i talked to the labor party politicians and i said why are you not doing this they say because it's not popular so really until we can get popular support for this the the technical question doesn't even come up but who do you define popular with who though because i'm sure like the average person it's funny because it wouldn't mind on youtube and you can see that tax the rich is eat the rich all of this i mean there's people making millions so obviously the The powerful people, swap up with the super rich, powerful people, but like the majority of the country, shouldn't they be behind it?

43:27Inheritance tax is a very unpopular tax. So they'll look at things like that and say there's no appetite for... I'll give you an example, right? Brexit. Yeah. We're the last talking about Brexit. Initially, both the major political parties, well, all three major political parties were vociferously against Brexit. Basically, all the main political parties. But, enough people in this country insisted that they would vote for whoever the fuck, was supporting Brexit, that now both the Conservatives and Labour basically have to support Brexit, even though most of them probably don't want to, right?

43:59They have to. We need to make taxation of wealth like that. We need to make a situation where if the main political parties say we're not supporting it, then they fucking lose the election. You know, that is what it needs to be. You know, that's what it needs to be. You know, and it needs that level of public support because these politicians, funded by very, very fucking rich people, in many cases are very rich people. they're not going to turn around and give this to us it needs ordinary people to demand it i think and where do you stand by like the counter argument that would be that these people are the ones that drive the economy and they're highly mobile and if you tax them they'll all just leave and you'll never get the money anyway great question all right number one okay i had millions of pounds working in the city i paid a lot of fucking tax i paid 60 you know i mean because it was the 50 top rate at that time plus national insurance when i was earning that money to bring my fucking family out of the fucking slums, right?

44:53Duke of Westminster inherited 10 billion pounds. Hugh. Paid nothing. Yeah. Paid nothing. Yeah. All right. Who is the guy who's driving the economy here? You know what I mean? Okay, you can shit on fucking bankers all your life, you know, Raheem Sterling, fucking Jack Grealish, you know, Kevin the fucking Bruiner. These guys, at least they fucking work their money and they pay tax. Yeah. Right? The very, very wealthy, they don't even fucking, all they do is own your fucking mum's mortgage. That's all they do. He owns Belgravia, doesn't he? Yeah, they own the fucking houses, right? You know, these guys are not, they are not driving the economy, they're owning the economy, right?

45:27So, you know, what I'm saying is we tax ordinary working people less and we tax guys who just fucking sit on fucking millions of pounds of assets, your houses, your fucking supermarkets, your fucking mortgages, government fucking debt, pay nothing, you know? So I'm not saying tax the people who drive the economy. I'm saying tax the people who fucking own the economy and do nothing. and on the subject of mobility they'll leave you know these guys are the least fucking economically mobile people in the fucking world all right you're a youtuber right we tag youtubers you can fuck off the fucking dubai and do your fucking youtube right these are the least mobile people in the world because they own your mortgage they own your house their money comes from you from yeah their money does not come from their work their money comes from you if it doesn't come from their work it comes from you right they need fucking you to leave these are the easiest people in the fucking world to tax because they own fucking Tesco.

46:18You know what I mean? They own your house. They own your mortgage, right? So I think the main reason why we have this idea that they can leave when they want is because they keep fucking telling us that because they fucking want us to fucking believe that. You know, I've read fucking Charles Dickens fucking Hard Times the other day and he was talking about how whenever we say we're going to tax industrialists, they say they'll throw their factories into the sea. You know what I mean? They've been saying this for fucking hundreds. They want you to believe that. And while you're fucking paying 50%, you know what I mean?

46:43Once everything's in, they're paying fucking nothing I'm fucking laughing we have Paul Johnson on who's the director of the IFS and he has a similar kind of like he approaches it from a different angle but he's like we're going to need more tax revenue and there's places we can get it that are more effective and he points to council tax as a regressive tax that could be a wealth tax because there's a 50 million pound house in Kensington that gets taxed the same as my four bed detached in up north you know and he's like that is a they can't take the house they can't plonk it in Dubai if they want to shelter their money here through property pay the tax yeah i think so i mean you know this there are many obvious ways you can improve it there are many obvious ways you can improve it i think the problem you have is people like myself come out and say we need to tax the rich and ordinary people understandably i think are cynical and skeptical because they've seen so many instances of we're going to tax the rich and the actual tax that gets delivered is it carves out the rich entirely and taxes the middle class.

47:41This is it. This whole, what I hate, and I say this on my channel all the time, a person on 20 grand a year and a person on 120 grand a year have far more in common than someone with a billion a year. You know, but it seems like they pit that 20 to a million. I think ultimately, a big part of what I need to do and what I think ordinary men and women, families across the country need to do is get people on the, 50th percentile the middle 70th percentile who might be on 80 grand you know i mean 20th percentile might be on like 15 20 grand you need to get them to to ally and realize the people who are taking all of our shit are the very rich if that cannot happen the rich will take everything yeah people need to be able to identify who the true threat is but you know who owns the fucking newspapers yeah they're all owned by billionaires increasingly the news channels are owned by billionaires you know i mean and you know i go on i go on tv i go on the radio who do i come up against i go up against somebody who works for iea institute economic affairs funded by billionaires paid for by billionaires i'm going on there for free you know i mean these guys are paying a lot of money to have ordinary people believe that the threat to their lifestyle is fucking guys coming on a boat from france and the meantime they're losing their houses they're going into debt they're losing their government services and the rich taking everything the problem is ordinary people are having it hidden from them who the real threat is.

49:10And, you know, you said that you live and die by your predictions. Yeah. So how long do you think we're talking in terms of timelines before we start to see real shit? If things stay the same and no one does anything and Nigeria or that kind of environment is like the worst case scenario, how long do you think we've got? I mean, the first thing to say is because the country is increasingly unequal, I think there is very often a lack of visibility including from people like me and people like yourselves people who are not on the very thin end of it I think there can be a lack of visibility about how much poverty has already increased and how much poverty already exists it is there I don't know how bad some people have it because I'm protected as a middle class and it's not I think for a long time during the austerity period you had this kind of bottom 20 % that was being really kicked but it was 20 % and I'm not saying that that is a good thing but it was 20 % but now we're talking about 40, 50, 60 % of people struggling.

50:05People in high rate tax funds as well. And you know, I haven't spoken about much on this. It's on my, I talk a lot on my channel about the, it's now 800 billion. It was 750 billion given out by the government that is now held by the rich. Massive amount, 16 ,000 pounds per adult. This enormous accumulation of cash by the rich during COVID. What are they going to do with that money? They're going to buy their houses. How did that get into their hands? So I'm an inequality economist, right? From the beginning of COVID, it was obvious there was going to be a long lockdown and the government was going to have to give a fuck ton of money out okay the government's given that so far at the time we're recording it will go up 800 billion pound that's total government deficits is the beginning of covid deficit means they've given it out you know they borrowed it or they printed it so somebody's got it now i want to know who has that money it's massive 16 grand per adult massive and i was i couldn't figure out who's got it right because if you look you think first oh it's the furloughed workers but if furloughed workers they're not sitting on six you know if it's just them they have about 80 grand each that's definitely not them and that's because they're not getting paid but they're not getting paid, right?

51:05It's substituting their wages. Okay, so who's got the wages? They've got 80 % as well, so they've actually got less than they would have been there. Yeah, exactly. Somebody's net winning here. If I come in and give out 800 billion quid, somebody's winning, all right? It's not the furloughed workers. The companies are not paying their wages, but they're shut down. Bounce back loans? Well, in many cases it is these, but the big winner in terms of accumulated cash was the people who would have been using the companies that employ the furloughed workers because they're not spending money anymore. Right.

51:32But the thing is, it's not all customers, right? Because ordinary families, especially poor families, their expenses are mainly mortgage rent, food bills. Still paying it. Still paying it. The expenses that disappeared during COVID, luxury expenditure. Basically, that's what got made illegal, non-essential luxury expenditure. But who has the most luxury expenditure? It's the fucking rich. Really, economically, what COVID was, was like an economic experiment. What happens if we make the rich spending money illegal? and the fact is that pays a lot of people's wages so the government printed it here's your wage what do you do with it?

52:08you pay your rent mortgage bills who owns your mortgage? the rich and they can't spend it you know the only way for them to get rid of it is to buy the assets of the middle class I guess we saw that on like a ground level of there was there was two types of people in COVID there was people that really struggled financially and then there was like a lot of families actually set the savings rate went up quite a lot because of that there was no you know everyone started renovating their gardens and was throwing money at builders because they weren't going on holiday and that. So you're saying it's a magnification of that same trend.

52:39I don't want to point too much to middle class because imagine you might have spent three grand, four grand, you know, renovating your house or whatever. You know, how much money do you think fucking Beyonce spends on luxury? This is what I mean. So it's the same. How much money, you know, these guys spend millions of pounds a year. You know, like Rishi Sunak, his wealth is 700 million quid, right? So how much is he going to make? If he makes 3 % on that, he's going to make 21 million quid a year. How much do you think this guy spends on luck? That's what he gets paid just for getting out of bed.

53:06How much luxury spending is he going to have? Two, three million quid a year? And he's going to accumulate that during COVID, right? I talked about the council tax thing that I said the other day on my channel and someone in the comments was like, no one's going to pay 300 grand a year for council tax. I was like, mate, I don't think you understand how much money some people have got. If you've got a hundred million pound flat in central London that you've never been in, like how much cash do you have? This is a big part of the problem in a sense. Ordinary people, for obvious reasons, they simply do not understand how rich the rich are.

53:31And it's invisible. And then, you know, when I say, when I talk about tax the rich, when I was a kid, I thought rich was 60 grand a year. That's what I thought rich was when I was a kid. 60 grand a year for me was unbelievable amount of money. That's what I thought. And now I realize that there's people who have personal wealth of 300, 400 million pounds. And the ordinary person's brain is just not wired to understand that amount. And they think rich is bankers, doctors, lawyers, which is what they want their kids to be. Yeah. You know what I mean? but it's not it's not listen i'm not here to tax bankers doctors lawyers i'm here to tax people who fucking own the fucking country they own the assets they own your mortgage they own the houses you know your point around i think you make it really clear and every time i watch your content i come away from it thinking this guy's not talking about taxing people who've just done well by buying a house in london he's talking about the uber rich i read a stat that there's 15 trillion of wealth in the uk and 25 of that is owned by one percent of the population so this is the demographic that you're kind of looking at targeting?

54:29Yeah, I want people to sort of, I've got a video on my channel, one of the oldest videos called What is Wealth? And ordinary people, the only wealth which they generally see in their lives, housing. A bit of pension. A bit of pension, yeah. I encourage people like, walk down your high street, walk down your high street, look at the shops and, you know, who owns them? Who owns the fucking skyscrapers in Canary Wharf? Who owns a fucking supermarket? Who owns a shopping centre? You know what I mean? who owns the fucking restaurants the pubs you know it's a lot of it is ownership of commercial wealth and these guys what they look like is usually they are families that have been wealthy for a long time it's they have their own sort of teams of accountants they call family offices and they just own all this stuff basically on paper they own the stocks they own the shares they own a ton of debt so that they own your mortgage then the government debts when you pay your taxes, the interest goes to them.

55:24And work is meaningless to them because they will make from their assets, you know, and I want people to understand this, these are your cashflow. So when you go to Tesco's, you know, some guy owns Tesco's, a big chunk of what you pay, it's just going, his profits, you know what I mean? But when you pay your mortgage - When you say that, you mean the building that it's in? The building that it's in? Yeah. Yeah. The literal building, the land in many cases, but in every single shop, you know, the office that you work in, you know, All the way people don't own these things. And they are owned by a small number of extremely wealthy families.

55:52Generally, you don't see them, you don't hear of them. Their kids go to eat. If you're lucky enough to go to Cambridge or Oxford, you might bump into a few of them here or there, throwing pounds off a roof or something. What you're looking for. Very, very wealthy families with private offices that own huge amounts of assets, including your mortgages, including large estates of stocks and shares, bonds. Your mortgages, your properties, the companies that you shop in, they will make tens of millions of pounds a year in the most extreme cases of your, and they'll use that money to buy the rest of the assets.

56:24I do think that, you know, going to Durham University, that was the first time I realised what wealth was when I saw it. And I don't think many people realise just how much money some people have because they have no interest in telling you how much money they've got. They don't come out and go, oh, I made a billion quid last year without even leaving my house. Do you know what I mean? And I think, you know, in a way, you're privileged to be able to go to a place like Durham. And, you know, I'm the same. LSE is full of this like this really really wealthy class because you actually start to see I had no idea I had no idea these people existed but there was also economic incentives are important right you need you need to tell people if they work hard they get to keep what they work and things like that yeah you know that is what I want that is what I fucking want because you know I've got mates who grew up in Ilford with me that work fucking hard and they're on like 70-80 grand you know what I mean you know that's like double more than double national average salary sleeping on their parents sofas saving every fucking penny because they can't afford a fucking flat yeah so we we live in an economy is this an economy that is rewarding hard work it really isn't to the land who's buying those flats kids that went to durham with you and oxford with me that don't even fucking work i want an economy that rewards fucking hard fucking work i want people who work and who study and who do good work and to be able to live good lives and we are not providing that.

57:46So, you know, if you ask me who is the real fucking capitalist in this room, I think it's fucking me. I am the one who wants hardworking people to be able to have good lives. But the economy that we are providing gives everything to a bunch of kids who never fucking work. It's like the American dream, isn't it? Of like, if you work hard, you'll get somewhere in life and actually that's not real. That's what they told us in school. Study hard, get good grades, get a good job, you'll be rich. Yeah, and I don't want to... It's like, that's not really, it's not as easy as it sounds. I don't want to discourage nobody, right?

58:13Listen, the kids out there work fucking hard, right? But have an understanding of the, the flip side of that, which is super important. It's really, really important, I think this, is I want people to understand that the economy we live in now does not in general reward people who work fucking hard. And it's not fair. And because I've got friends that work fucking hard and they don't understand why they can't buy a house. And I've got other friends that get half a million quid from their mum and buy the fucking house. And the kids who are working hard, they don't know that that kid got half a million quid for his mum.

58:44And they think that they personally have failures. And it's terrible, terrible for the mental health of young people. So I think it's super important that young people understand that we live in an unfair economy. And if you are not doing well financially and you're working hard, it's probably not your fault. And don't be hard on yourself, man. Because I see it. I see people like, why? You know, you say the same. I was like that for a long time. Yeah, you say the same. Why are they on the property ladder before me and then you dig into it and they've got a load of money off the pay. Yeah, and I think like we need to sort of train people to understand that if you were born behind and you're behind now, that's not your fault.

59:22It doesn't mean you're a failure. It doesn't mean you're an idiot. It doesn't mean you're not working hard because I see the damage it's doing to young people. There's something even more beautiful about someone who goes from nothing to something, like buys their own home. You know, I've got friends of mine that come from poor families that are working fucking hard and they've got kids and all they want to do is support their kids and they think they're not doing enough. And I want those people to be proud of themselves. If we, let's say at the end of this, you feel charged up and you're like, yeah, I want to let it be known that I want to tax the rich.

59:49Where'd you go? There's no... Gary's Economics YouTube channel. Could you say like... I mean, there are organisations that I support, Tax Justice UK. The truth is, there's disappointingly little out there in terms of organisations. Tax Justice UK is the most obvious one. you can support them there's not enough I'm trying to build it you know you know I don't want to be all like follow my YouTube by my book but the truth is I'm fucking trying to build this you know that's the reason I do what I do like you know I bounce around what is called the third sector charity sector and there's lots of people campaigning for lots of things it is very very difficult to fund an organization saying tax the rich because the biggest funders are the fucking rich all right so I do what I do fucking free because I don't want society to collapse you know what I mean and that's the reason why there's not much else I'm a multi-millionaire okay I can afford to do this for free okay there are not many people who can simultaneously afford to do this and are willing to do it my job was to look at the economy and understand what's happening and I was a judge to be one of the best people in the world at that my assessment is from here it gets worse and worse and worse quickly I've been to the fucking top of the mountain and what I saw was a fucking tsunami coming and you know who's in front of that tsunami my fucking family my fucking friends the kids I grew up with that is that is who is there so I'm fucking down now and I'm saying that's fucking coming are we gonna fucking avoid it or not and you know I don't know whether I'm gonna achieve that don't think that just because this is England it can't happen here because it can happen here you know and I don't want it to happen and you know I've made money and I'm comfortable you know I can afford to do what I do I'm not saying that I'm like some sort of holier than our guy i do not want that to happen here and i want to and i'm not just saying that this is going to happen right i was i made millions of pounds betting on this and i still bet on it today you know in my heart of hearts i'm a fucking trader and i look at what's happening cold eyes dead eyes and i'll tell you what's going to happen that is what is going to happen in this country and i don't want it to happen so i'm trying to stop it you know and that's that's why i do what I do, it's as simple as that in my eyes, you know.

1:01:54So you made a point now where you said, you know, I'm still making that bet. And you clearly raised before how you were conflicted that you were from a background and what you were essentially doing was betting that that background was gonna go into the floor. Yeah. How do you still make that bet then? So I'm a trader. I was a full-time trader from 2008 to 2014. 14 um and i'm good at it i was very good at it and trading is how i came to understand the economy and it's also how i test my understanding of the economy right so you know we talk about this story in the book a lot about my journey in trading right and um it was like early 2011 that i kind of finally like got this idea like all right inequality that's it inequality is the big thing economy's fucked it's gonna go downhill bam bam bam it's gonna get worse and worse and worse like and i was 24 then and i was like confident enough bam i believe this big trade big position we're gonna put the fucking career on this and it paid off big time and that was my job you know i mean and um when you first have the idea you're confident you back it but you don't know and then you're right bam ton of money well fucking done mate go again okay what do you think is gonna happen well it's the same fucking problem bam on again big fucking disaster collapse bam then happens again and like it's your job you know i mean like if your job is like you know if you're a fucking hairdresser you don't think like what does this mean you know i mean if you you know you just fucking cut hair if you're a fucking taxi driver you fucking drive taxis you're a math teacher you teach maths like that was my job but then like these these things start to come in like Like, you know, yeah, but maybe you should fucking do something about that.

1:03:42But then it's like, well, you know, what the fuck do you do? How do you fucking stop it? You know what I mean? I know these are these big conflicts I had and I decided like, okay, we're going to go away. We're going to try and fix it. And I did stop trading for a while. For a while I stopped trading. And, you know, people who read the book will fucking see I had the fucking trip in trading. Like we had some time like leaving with there were some problems. Yeah, some crazy stories. It was pretty clear in the book. and I took a little bit of time out and I went travelling and that and I did my bits I made my website eventually went back to uni and then I was sitting at uni one day and I pulled up my there's some fucking boring fucking econometrics bullshit lecture I pulled up my phone and I saw again again the markets predicting big fucking recovery this is like late 2017 and I was like these fucking idiots there's not going to be no fucking recovery it's fucked and I was like fuck it if they want to pay me that bad we're back in and then you know that paid off right um and then i covid happened right and that was when i when i first started writing articles was the beginning of covid and again i could see like from the beginning of covid i could see inequality would blow up and i was like this is going to be the unmitigated economic disaster of my lifetime and um those predictions are fucking right anybody can come out and tell you the fucking world's ending you know what i mean the fucking jehovah's witnesses have been doing it for years.

1:05:03You know what I mean? Not everybody can come in, drop their money on the fucking table and clear up. And I do that fucking year after year after year after year. And that is why people fucking listen to me. Listen, people look at me, right? Listen, everybody is clear. I don't come from like a wealthy background, right? Everywhere I go, I see comments. Who's this guy? He's not a fucking economist, all right? I'm the fucking guy who's fucking right. And that's what I've got. Yeah. Do you think there'll be cynics that will be like, you made your money out of the system, now you're trying to build a platform by saying that system's wrong?

1:05:38If I wanted to get famous, I could have got famous a long fucking time ago. And I tried to do a lot of things to stop this. Listen, sometimes it's nice. I get recognised, some people buy my beers in the pub. Okay, it's nice. You know what I mean? I don't want to not be able to fucking go with my girlfriend to the park without people. I love it when people come up and talk to me and I appreciate everybody's super supportive. You know what I mean? If I wanted to be famous, I would be a lot more fucking famous than I am. You know what I mean? You know, we're writing this book now that's gonna give me a lot of publicity.

1:06:09I can make a lot more money writing more books, but what am I doing in my spare time building that fucking YouTube? I've made zero from YouTube, nothing. Every single penny that's come from YouTube has gone on production. It runs at a loss for me. You know what I mean? I don't need to do that. I don't need to do that. If I wanted to be famous, if I wanted to be rich, I've had opportunities to be more famous than I am, opportunities to be more rich than I am. But, you know, what I'm doing is trying to build a political platform to stop this. And, you know, some people will be sceptical and there's always haters, but...

1:06:37Have you ever thought about becoming a politician? If I join the Labour Party, I have to say what the Labour Party fucking tells me to say. If I have fucking a million views a week on YouTube, you know what I mean? Or maybe more, you know what I mean? Then the Labour Party has to say what I have to fucking tell them to say. You know, I don't trust these guys. You know, I don't fucking trust these guys. I'm not saying, you know, I don't trust the Conservatives anymore. You know what I mean? but I don't trust these politicians, right? I will talk to the politicians when they fucking have to listen to me.

1:07:01And if this YouTube is fucking massive, then they fucking have to listen to me. That's my plan. They're all self-serving in their ambition and in attention, which is an interesting point around the whole economy though. Isn't an economy just a load of decisions, right? And everyone is just acting in their own best interests in that moment. Is it philosophical? We're going to get philosophical on this one. We're going to get philosophical. I mean... Because everyone's, you know, there's always like it's them. It's their fault So alright I was a successful trader right Yeah I run a YouTube channel now We talk about trading Like a little bit It's not a trading channel We mainly talk about This fucking economic disaster And trying to stop it It's a political channel essentially It's an economics And political channel You know what I mean And it's a passion project It's something I believe in The number one question I get asked On that channel Tell me how to make money That's so funny It's funny It's funny And at the same time it's a bit fucking heartbreaking.

1:07:57Have you ever heard this story? Like there's two guys in a forest, right? And they see a bear. One of them bends down and starts tying up a shoelace. And the other one says to him, why are you tying, you're not going to outrun a fucking bear? And the other guy goes, I don't need to outrun a bear, mate. I just need to outrun you. When I get these messages, I'm reminded of that story. But there's like 20 fucking bears. You know, this, if the economy collapses, you ain't gonna fucking trade your way out of it i feel like i've come down from the lookout of a ship and i've said guys the way we're going we're going to hit an iceberg ships going down and everyone's like sorry mate i'm trading ig index like listen if society fucking collapses your fucking investments are not going to do shit for you you know i mean i thought you know i know that's not a positive message to say but that is the truth you know that is the truth so So I think you raise an interesting point about like everybody doing what's best for themselves, right?

1:08:57You know, the truth is power exists, okay? And rich, powerful people, not because they're evil, but because they always have done, try and get richer and try and get more powerful. It's not, they're not terrible people. This is what people fucking do. Yeah, I'm in nature. Right? And they can because they're rich and they're powerful, right? And right now, the easiest thing for them to do is to take your fucking assets. and their kids will own the assets that you own now instead of your kids, right? That is clearly the direction of wealth inequality, right? Wealth is going in that direction. And yet everybody is thinking, how do I make money for me?

1:09:31Okay. The only power that ordinary people have who are not super rich, right? Is that there's a fucking lot of them, all right? If they do not use that power, then what they have will be taken by the powerful. You know, when I first started doing what I was doing i felt like my my job was to teach people about economics and i still do do that but i almost feel like there's become this spiritual element to the job i need to convince ordinary people to care about one another and in a way i think that is the the only way for them to be selfish if they don't care about one another they will they will they will see the damage themselves yeah it's beautiful that in a way because like it's like everyone knows money won't make them happy but they want to find that out for themselves you know like this whole that's another it's a big part of my you know you can read the book and you have you know you see it's an irony it's an irony and i'm i say that well when i was a kid all i fucking wanted was to make money that's all i fucking wanted so i don't turn around to people like i'm not saying to anyone you're a bad person trying to make money i fucking understand it i understand it but unfortunately we are moving into a difficult world now where you need to because i'm not you know i know people struggling to take care of their kids and i'm not going to say fuck that support my youtube channel the fact is ordinary and poor people if they want to survive here and they want to thrive in the long run they have to do both they have to be able to take care of themselves and their family and participate in some form in protecting their political interests they have to do both unfortunately you are being attacked on two sides here you are being attacked as individual and you are being attacked as a class and you need to win both of those battles to protect yourselves is there anything positive on the horizon that we can look forward to listen Like anything that you think - Garage books out of it, man.

1:11:12You know, the books are seriously - Is there anything that you think that might unite people? No, I mean, I'll do what I can, but listen, we have seen enormous increases in equality here. And what that has meant is, you know, the increases in living standards, which could have been shared by things like, you know, the massive industrialization of Asia or the invention of the internet, you know what I mean? These could have been shared throughout society. Those improvements have been basically monopolized by the rich. So in a sense, what that means is there's this huge potential improvement in living standards, which has been withheld from the people because the rich have kept it.

1:11:46So I think if we are able to.

1:11:51And also what I'm saying is the problem is understandable. I think sometimes what is happening with the economy is treating the media as if it's like a fucking natural disaster, like a fucking earthquake or like it's nothing we can do. It's out of our control. Oh, my God. No, I'm going to see it coming. Jeremy Hunt described it as black swans. Unprecedented black swans. Yeah, but like, there is a problem which we can understand. Inequality is exploding. That means that the rich are living lives are unbelievable luxury at the cost of ordinary people. We can fix that. The wealth is there. The productive capacity is there.

1:12:26COVID didn't destroy the productive capacity of the economy. You know, nobody came and knocked your house down. What it did do was massively increase inequality. That's reversible. so what I'm coming in and saying is we do not have to accept these falls in living standards we can have better lives we can be richer but only if we're willing to grasp this problem so if I want to give a positive message things can be better and things will be better if we unite and protect ourselves as the mass of the people who are losing out to the rich you know things can be better but only if we are able to unite yeah I think you know anyone who is sensible could agree with those those points thank you i mean is are you a good human being i mean you're a legend mate honestly this is why i wanted you on because i think you're a really important voice within the space and i can be guilty myself i think of sometimes going like you know just work harder just do this buy your index fund and even myself it's like there's a cap on my ability to break out of where I started from you know and like I would I would put that pressure on myself and be like I'm a failure because I'm not where I should you know where this guy at Durham is or wherever yeah I would like people to just listen what work hard save your money and you've got all these videos explaining to people what you do but look it's understand the unfairness that exists in our society and understand that it's a difficult time and it's going to get more difficult and understand that when you when you look at others and understand that when you look at yourself it's hard it's going to be hard and we're going to need to help each other to get through this well that's it for season two we'll be back with our full length episodes in a couple of weeks time but stay locked in because in the meantime we're answering all your biggest money questions in our ask us anything episodes if you want a bullet point summary of this episode you can sign up to our newsletter using the link in the description and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review it really makes a difference and lets us know that we're doing a good job i'm damo i'm t this episode was recorded by jack hobbs music is by felix taylor it was produced and edited by ruth edwards johnny hunter is in charge of marketing and it's all brought together by will stolomon

From the publisher

Gary Stevenson is a former city trader who made millions from betting on growing inequality. With his YouTube Channel @GarysEconomics he now campaigns to end the very thing he made money from. He's written a book called ‘The Trading Game: A Confession’ about his experiences in finance and what drove him to leave a life where he earnt millions a year.

He warns that without a tax on the super rich, wealth inequality will continue to increase, leaving the majority of us much worse off.

You can order Gary’s book here: https://amzn.to/3SJGXeM

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