At 12 years old, Gary Stevenson sold candy. At 16, he was kicked out of high school for selling cannabis. At 23, Citigroup gave him a bonus of 47,000 euros for selling… money, loans. It was double the annual salary of his father, a Post Office employee. At 26, he was a millionaire, but he had holes in his shoes and was unable to buy a couch for his empty house. Mentally and physically exhausted, he decided to leave, even though he claims that they threatened him to make him stay. Now 36, the British economist has become an activist. He dedicates his time to warning of the collapse of the economy due to inequality. He tells the story of him in The money game. An intruder on top of the world (Peninsula).
Ask. Why have you written this book? Is it a warning or a confession?
Answer. Both. It is part of a political project. The economy is getting worse and worse without most economists realizing it. I try to raise awareness about this by writing in newspapers, with my own YouTube channel… but to connect with people you have to tell them a story and I wrote about my experience. I think it is much more effective than any purely economics book I could write.
Q. He says that shortly before entering Citigroup an employee committed suicide by jumping from the 20th floor. Did you think about that man while you worked?
R. The truth is, no. One of my colleagues there told me about it. Banks have a long history of suicides from skyscrapers. He could have jumped from the outside, but he jumped through the inner courtyard, he wanted to be seen. People went to look at the man who had committed suicide and then returned to their desk to work. That speaks to how that world works, the level of obsession. I also thought: ‘Things happen.’ It is an example of the dehumanization that that site produces.
Q. What should a financial intermediary in the City be like? What do you need to survive?
R. There is a book Catch 22, which tells what each person does to survive the war: some become obsessed with money, others with escaping and others with enjoying everything they can. There were financial intermediaries, traders, They got drunk, took drugs, went to Las Vegas…the addiction to cocaine is quite widespread, as well as to gambling. Others, like me, were obsessed with being the best. And many people do not survive because they become dehumanized, they become aggressive people who hate others.
Very intelligent people, with the most expensive suits and haircuts and who went to the best universities, make mistakes all the time. I made a lot of money thanks to that
Q. He says, “Many rich people expect poor people to be stupid.” Did she use it as an advantage?
R. Absolutely. They assumed he was an idiot. It happened to me at the London School of Economics, in Oxford… But, precisely at the financial intermediaries’ floor, I realized that they thought: ‘If this guy with this accent is here it’s because he must be very smart, because if not, How did it get here?’ I had no idea what he was doing, but they thought I was going to be the best and in the end I became the best.
Q. He once lost eight million before winning much more. “The best operations are done with the nose. They smell like stupidity.” What is it referring to?
R. When you are a financial intermediary you do not make money when you are right, but when you are right and others are wrong. I specialized in that, in smelling nonsense. My big operation was in 2011 because everyone thought things were going to get better and everyone was wrong. With the nuclear crisis in Japan, everyone went crazy: no one really knew what it was about, but everyone pretended that they did. Economists have been wrong for 15 years. Very intelligent people, with the most expensive suits and haircuts and who went to the best universities, make mistakes all the time. I made a lot of money thanks to that.
Q. I was betting on disaster. What would have happened if there hadn’t been people like you who were betting that the economy was going to crash?
R. The history of the economy of the last 15 years is that of mistaken optimism because there is an undiagnosed structural crisis. If you have cancer and are not diagnosed, if they treat the symptoms, but not the cause, you will get worse. That’s what’s happening in the economy. Nobody looks at the distribution, the inequality. Financial intermediaries don’t change things, even though they pay them a lot of money. Politicians are not paid to do the right thing, to be right, but to win elections. There are no incentives in the public sector to get it right, to do the right thing.
Q. But if they don’t do the right thing, they may lose the next election.
R. Yes, and David Cameron made £10m the year he quit. Tony Blair’s son is one of the richest men in the world. The current Prime Minister’s father-in-law is one of the richest men in the world. Politicians who lose elections end up extremely rich.
We burn witches while we walk to hell. I don’t want to be on board the ‘Titanic’ and point out the iceberg, I want to move the ship out of the way and prevent it from sinking.
Q. When he was transferred to Japan he was devastated. His girlfriend, who only accompanied him when he had his own job and income, asked him to leave Citigroup, but at that time, you left the girl, not the job. Did she exchange money for happiness?
R. Now I could be on a beach in the Philippines, I wouldn’t have to be making this book or videos for YouTube. I come from a humble family, from a bad neighborhood, from a complicated childhood. I don’t do what I do for money, but because I don’t want the bad guys to win. Sometimes I wonder why kids from good families aren’t fighting the system. I do it because I don’t want the world to go to hell. That money I was fighting for then [un bonus que le debían] It’s what pays for the work I do now.
Q. Who are “the bad guys”?
R. Many people who read the book will think it is the banks. There is a tendency to personalize it in them, but that is not what I mean. I feel a lot of empathy for my former colleagues, although they are millionaires and can take care of themselves. I am convinced that poverty will grow massively in the next ten years because the system guarantees a flow of wealth away from the middle class, increasing inequality. Their grandchildren will live in poverty. We could say that the bad guys are guys like Elon Musk or Soros, but that won’t get us anywhere. We burn witches while we walk to hell. I don’t want to be on board Titanic and point out the iceberg, I want to move the ship out of the way and stop it from sinking. Working in a bank helped lift my family out of poverty. The bad guys aren’t them, it’s the system.
The right has constructed a narrative that is not correct, but is convincing: “You are poor because of immigrants,” when it is because the rich are the children of the rich.
Q. Caleb, his mentor, retired at age 29, but later returned. Has he been tempted to return?
R. I still dream that I am still a financial intermediary. I look at the markets every day. I don’t miss the money, but rather being known as the best. But I don’t think I’ll ever come back. What I do now is important.
Q. What relationship do you have with money now?
R. I don’t spend much. I live frugally. I don’t wake up and think about money, I think about how to win this fight. In my life I went very quickly from being judged for being poor to being judged for being rich.
Q. It says: “The rich stay with the assets, the poor, with the debt.” How do you see the future of the middle class?
R. It’s going to shrink and shrink. The future? Look at Colombia, Mexico, Brazil… Europeans are somewhat naive. They think that what happens in those places cannot happen here, but countries with a lot of inequality end up like this. When you read Dickens you see the poverty of my country 150 years ago. We are losing the standards of well-being that our parents fought for.
Q. He signed a letter with other British millionaires asking the prime minister to raise their taxes. But people who will never smell that amount of money that you handle oppose the rich paying more. What do you attribute it to?
R. There are several reasons. The right has constructed a narrative that is not correct, but is convincing: ‘You are poor because of immigrants, who occupy your home and your job’, when it is because of inequality, because the rich are the children of the rich. , who are the ones who take the money, not the immigrants. And the left does not have a clear message, it is not able to explain that things can be changed. There are many rich people who own many newspapers capable of convincing people that the problem is immigrants. We are going to a more xenophobic Europe and we could end up where we were 100 years ago.
Q. He talks about the economy of inheritance, but education is also against that, right? You are living proof: from a poor neighborhood to the London School of Economics and from there to Citigroup.
R. Yes, I came from a poor neighborhood and I got a good job and a lot of money. But almost everyone I know is as rich as their father and I know a lot of people who can’t afford a house on their salary alone. It is not a meritocracy. The estate is hereditary.
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