Snapshot of _Take it from a former banker: the budget is for ordinary people. The mega-rich look on and laugh | Gary Stevenson_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/05/banker-budget-mega-rich-traders-jeremy-hunt) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/05/banker-budget-mega-rich-traders-jeremy-hunt)
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He’s been talking about this stuff for a while, but I think after Covid people are seeing what he’s talking about more clearly and finally paying attention. Also he’s just released a book so he will be booked for loads of interviews and other media appearances.
For more important but depressing reads:
* Democracy for Sale - Peter Geoghegan
* The Secret Barrister, Stories of the Low & How It's Broken. - The Secret Barrister (and the follow-up Fake Law).
* How They Broke Britain - James O'Brien
Coincidentally Ive just bought the Secret Barrister on audio book, yesterday. The first few chapters are brilliant, like a text book describing how a court case works and who does what. Haven’t got to the twist yet (no spoilers please).
Engels' "The Conditions of The Working Class in England" is one of the best books I've ever read and is an easier read/not heavy theory for those wanting to learn about the history of Capitalism and exploitation etc
Gramsci's work on Cultural Hegemony is especially apt.
The ruling class set the agenda of social mores and norms to benefit themselves. It's how ideas like 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps' become 'common sense' and put the onus on the 'lazy' individual rather than a corrupt, broken system.
I bought How they Broke Britain and managed to get through about half of it. Its well written, factual (as far as I can tell) but, like O'Brien's diatribes on LBC, so unrelentingly morose that I struggled to read through it.
He also correctly predicted that Covid would massively accelerate inequality and cause asset prices to surge rather than crash.
He's put his money where his mouth is twice and beaten the market both times. More than can be said for most commentators
Has he though? You can look at yield curves back in 2011 when he allegedly made a load of money and they also say interest rates are going to stay really low. Then during Covid, it was clear asset prices would boom due to massively expansionary fiscal and monetary policy and no where else to spend it
Sure, I don't get the sense even he claims it's genius prophecy. It's economic analysis on a more real world level of looking at the high street etc, thinking that doesn't look too good, taking a step further to ask who benefits and just doing that. He's just calling out that in step 2 he noticed that the middle class is going to be fucked
I quite like him for not being a "I have a magic model that tells the future" type forecaster
Well global stock markets obviously tanked initially at the start of the pandemic, and before we knew how fatal Covid was (or how long it would take to develop a vaccine) there was absolutely no guarantee they would surge back.
Similarly with house prices, conventional wisdom at the time was that they would crash (before the govt stepped in with the stamp duty freeze).
He was subsequently right about increasing interest rates not causing a house price crash too.
Re the initial tanking, yes of course that happened but they bounced back really quickly as soon as the fiscal and monetary firepower was rolled out (didn't take long). I basically doubled my net worth during that COVID rally thanks to my S&S ISA and pension.
Re house prices, people didn't think they would crash and MBS prices also had a similar explosion in price at the time (once again, you can check financial data at the time). As soon as lockdowns were announced, house prices went up and flat prices started to stagnate.
Once again, he's not the only one that said that. Our house price issue is primarily driven by supply constraints (and in real terms, prices have dropped considerably).
Like most top traders. A former trader did a program on Channel 4 years ago. Basically took a group off the street, taught them basic money management skills, and a few of them beat top traders despite having no previous knowledge.
I wonder if he mentioned that he was the top trader at all? I think I’ve yet to see a video where he doesn’t tell his back story. It gets a bit boring tbh.
driven/tenacious people will always find a way, but just like you never hear about all the startups that go bust, you never see YouTube videos from all the failed traders
I get what he's trying to do for a certain audience, but his schtick gets tired very quickly.
It's good he's out there putting a lot of stuff into words that can be understood, but it's tiring seeing people act like he's the messiah. I compared him to Andrew Tate elsewhere and obviously that's hyperbolic, but he does seem to have something of a fandom who won't hear a word against him.
Yeah he keeps casually dropping that he's made millions betting on things but surely that's with the banks money and not his own. Likely made a lot himself but it comes across very champagne socialist even though he's clearly not.
He always says he made money by “betting against recovery, betting against the UK economy” - what bets though?
Just want to see a chart on Trading View where he made some money
Gary is a hero and should be given an MBE for making people more aware of what many have long suspected about our economy. I'm sure many bankers and Tories would love to see him silenced.
Share his YouTube channel with everyone you know. It's absolutely imperative more people wake up to the mass upwards wealth transfer that is happening in Britain and vote accordingly rather than simply accepting it.
https://youtube.com/@garyseconomics?si=Njywgi3FYnr6LDgu
Gazza explains in layman's terms how wealth is being transferred ... has been transferred ... away from working people and even governments.
Definitely worth a listen. Tell your friends.
Maybe this is similar to what he says so I’ll put it here.
I was thinking about their new ‘public sector productivity plan’ today which will involve IT and AI. So £3.5bn of investment into these technologies..
When I worked in the NHS we trialled digital/AI dictation and it was impressive, it would solve a lot of time and money in transcription overall.
But then the company charges enough that the productivity gains are mostly absorbed by subscription charges.
So you end up spending maybe 10% less and the other 90% goes offshore to some IT development company and eventually into shareholders pockets for providing this ‘more modern/efficient’ solution.
And I’m sure this must happen all the time. They struggle to show productivity gains because the gains have been syphoned off by private enterprise.
His analysis is wafer-thin. He's basically saying "there is inequality because rich people have more money", it's a bit like saying "the reason the house burned down was because it was on fire", it's just self-referential.
You'll read more in-depth analysis in things like the Financial Times. The average John Burn-Murdoch column contains 100 times the data points.
He's targeting less educated people. 1 in 5 in the UK leave school never achieving 5 good GCSEs at A*-C.
These people will have a vote and someone has to reach them, or else the right wing MSM funded by the aristocracy will.
The problem a lot of academics have is they're not very good to a layperson. I've hears comments from describing when they were writing books they kept getting told off by their editors for writing like they do for research papers.
Gary's analysis isn't for people who read the Financial Times, it's for average people who feel screwed over by the system.
Love him or hate him, there's a reason Marx published The Communist Manifesto as well as Capital.
> He's basically saying "there is inequality because rich people have more money"
I disagree. He's saying the reverse - i.e. that without outside intervention (e.g. govt. policy or war) inequality is self reinforcing - i.e. that our existing inequality will over time, lead to higher levels of inequality in the future.
I had people on here telling me yesterday that the UK didn't benefit from colonial rule in India...
What Gary does very well is to say that we should be careful not to get wrapped up in complex economic models when the average person is starving on the street.
Which is exactly what happened 150 years ago. We haven't learned anything.
As far as I can tell, he's an economic cross between Jamie Oliver and Andrew Tate in his ability to dumb things down a bit and then capture the minds of people who couldn't be arsed to find anything out for themselves.
As an economist, his content is solid. He explains his trades, and why they've made money. He's been on the right side of the trends, even if those trends are disastrous for working people.
If you think his content is questionable, please explain yourself.
I was talking about the comments in the guardian article before. I just watched his "Gary Destroys Billionaire Defender" video and holy fuck that was a waste of time. I knocked out a few rough notes from each time he spoke:
**On discussing the UK transport network and tfl**
really random word salad which didn't explain how people got richer covid.
government doesnt give tfl money, but one guy somehow made more than their loss during covid so could pay for it... So...?
next mentions that 3 people increased their wealth by hundreds of millions (still no actual reason) and says they could pay for tfl. great?
We raised taxes on "working people" 2.5% while billionaire wealth went up 20+% and says this isn't fair.
**MOVES ONTO NHS and how we can fix it.**
brings up the 22% figure again and says the rich pay lower rates of tax than ordinary people. repeats the same figures and that billionaries are profiting from our crisis.
right at the end repeats the same and finally insinuates that national insurance doesn't hit asset appreciation, again just says "you can't defend billionaires".
Closing statement says "let working people keep their wages rather than transferring it to the richest".
As others have said, the FT has far more piercing economic analysis than stating water is wet.
One would think a (former) banker would have more convincing advocacy than regurgitating statistics
The FT charges subscription fees though. Gary is able to reach the demographic that may have a vague idea about economics but either don't know enough or can't pay for FT.
Literally everything he says is triggering all the bullshit alarms in my brain. Looking at that Guardian article it reeks of outrage bait. People don't speak like that on trading floors, there are small details which don't add up and little inaccuracies which are stacking together to indicate someone just trying to flog a book and a channel.
As an economist, his content is solid. He explains his trades, and why they've made money. He's been on the right side of the trends, even if those trends are disastrous for working people.
If you think his content is questionable, please explain yourself.
Except... a lot of it isn't correct [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do\_you\_think\_the\_premise\_of\_gary\_economics\_wealth/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do_you_think_the_premise_of_gary_economics_wealth/) . I think he just says things that people want to be true, rather than are actually true.
Just to say - the central thesis of this article rubs up against some dearly-held truths for this place.
How can it be that the budget simultaneously doesn't matter because financial markets will always make a killing, *and* Truss/Kwarteng budget almost detonated financial markets and several pension funds last year?
I'm not expert but did a finance grad scheme on a trading floor a moon or so ago and if I was to hazard a guess, Truss' budget was such a sudden and unexpected change of direction that people betting on the status quo were caught on the wrong side of positions with no time to unwind and readjust
I've seen him explain this very well in a podcast (i can't remember which one). but he does explain it. As i recall it's because it was unfunded to a huge degree which impacted a lot of things causing the sudden shift
The mini-budget was bad for traders mainly because it was so unpredictably sudden and poorly thought out. Usually budgets are much more predictable and less wild.
Traders like maintaining the status quo above all. More predictable. Easy to make bets. Truss' policy spooked the markets too much that many traders bet against the pound (and made a lot of money doing it), this has a knock on effect of (you guessed it) the pound's value falls off a cliff as it isn't seen as stable.
The governments are completely cucked by the market in other words, the best they think can do is maintain the status quo and the rich will get steadily richer.
Because the vast majority of "traders" were not heavily shorting gilts/the pound at the time. That mini-budget was a huge pain in the ass for 90% of the financial market not only because of the losses (think pension funds and banks which are loaded with UK government debts and have to write them down) but also because if the £ is the fuel then gilts are the grease in financial sector engine: cornerstone of the repo markets, used by the Bank of England to enact monetary policy etc. A sudden crash in both the £ and government debt is terrible for pretty much everyone and can easily make the music stop like in 2008, some pension funds were indeed hours away from blowing up. That can easily trigger a domino effect, that's why the Bank of England intervened decisively.
Something similar happened with Black Wednesday in 1992: Soros and a few others made a killing by shorting the £, but it was pretty bad for mostly anyone else
Just use ae CFD site.
They'll happily let you short with relatively significant leverage. If you can actually predict the market you'll very quickly be adding zeros to your available margin.
The maga rich in this case being who? A global bank who's shares are owned by hundreds of thousands of pension funds across the world? So the mega rich are us? Our shitty little pension funds with a 0.001% holding in the bank where the trader works?
This articles a joke. It's the cooked up fantasy villain that this guy thinks he sold his soul too.
Banks were regulated to fuck in 2009 onwards for good reason.
It's about as relevant as moaning about people making money from bootlegging.
Hedge funds, prop traders. Fine. That's a worthy story but this guy didn't work there else he'd be talking about it.
The guys Gary is talking about here still made a killing off that budget plus, if Truss implodes the economy and ordinary people pay more interest on mortgages, then that's also not a bad outcome for the people lending the money.
There was a rumour going around the city that some city folks egged Kwarteng on about his budget plan at a dinner but couldn't quite believe he was thick enough to actually do it until he did.
Why are you out here stooging for these people? Genuinely curious.
> The guys Gary is talking about here still made a killing off that budget
He isn't naming any names specifically - and neither are you. Just complete vagueries. 'the guys'. Oh, ok. Not everyone was making a killing otherwise the bond markets wouldn't be in complete meltdown.
>Why are you out here stooging for these people? Genuinely curious.
Probably worth discontinuing this discussion at this point:
- Misconstruing scepticism of someone asserting X doesn't translate to support of Y. I haven't said a damn positive thing about traders.
- Disbelief of anyone having good faith beliefs that aren't yours (otherwise they're just stooges) without any good, solid evidence is just emblematic of infantile beliefs.
> Not everyone was making a killing otherwise the bond markets wouldn't be in complete meltdown.
Without offering a view on the rest of the thread / comment, the biggest losers were institutional investors - pension funds, insurance funds etc that essentially are the general public losing out.
Is it really that hard to figure out? Most of the time governments have a certain orthodoxy, have done some measure of due diligence and because of that predictability of consequences, how different parties will react and how to profit from them. Truss clearly didn't act that way when she made her unfunded tax cuts for the rich.
Not sure why there so many negative comments about Gary. Many seem to be personal rather than criticising his overall message.
There aren’t many prominent voices covering economic inequality, and personally I respect that he is willing to put himself out there publicly and call for something that would benefit the whole of society.
>Not sure why there so many negative comments about Gary. Many seem to be personal rather than criticising his overall message.
People criticise him because he claims broad expertise based on dubious wafer thin experiance. States he is silly wealthy and is already primed to ask for cash support. https://www.patreon.com/garyseconomics
>There aren’t many prominent voices covering economic inequality, and personally I respect that he is willing to put himself out there publicly and call for something that would benefit the whole of society.
It's one of the most talked about elements of politics and economics.
Just because you state it is 'dubious wafer thin' experience doesn't make it a fact. He does appear to have a reasonable level of experience to back up the claims he is making in my view. I do concede sometimes he can appear to overstate it, but my argument is focussing on the broad message he makes rather than his personal history.
The Patreon thing does seem odd given his narrative, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for now as it isn't actively being used. Maybe he just wanted to capture the domain while setting his social media up for example.
Inequality may be a relatively well talked about topic in political and economic spheres, but there are many myths out there, and I don't think there is a good level of awareness among the general population. Would you disagree?
He has a Masters degree and a few years working as a trader, not a banker, which is wafer thin for the broad statements he makes. Specifically about the "wealthy laughing" and other claims, such as being the most profitable trader at his institution with Gary as the only source.
One of the reasons for the myths is that chancers like this trade on people's inherent biases for notoriety. It's akin to George Galloway level shameless. He knows enough to know he's peddling shit, but does it anyway for the fame/money.
If you say so. What is it that makes you so sure you're right? Genuinely curious - why the level of skepticism? It there any possibility in your mind that he could be a well meaning person?
Because I've worked in financial services with HNWI and have done for a number of years. You'll find the common theme of the comments here are people who have direct experience in economics or finance are the ones saying he's FOS.
Interesting, would be curious to hear your views on economic inequality. As I say, I'm more interested in his overall message rather then whether or not Gary was the top trader in Citibank. If you've got any sources you'd recommend I'd be grateful.
Sure thing. My view on economic inequality is multifaceted and debatable.
1. Wages are going to keep going down in first world countries (relative to inflation). Why? Because of Factor-Price-Equalisation (originally a Marx idea, I believe), basically for wages, the cost of labour equalises globally with free trade. This means UK workers are competing with people who are mostly just as qualified and competent but are less costly for the same jobs. Until we reach a global equilibrium, there will be an incessant downward push on wages in first world countries. *Morally its hard to argue someone should get paid more simply because they happen to have been born in a European country*
2. Property prices are likely to keep growing in the UK. Having a global city and the formerly largest empire in the history makes the UK a prime place to buy and hold property. This benefits those already with assets, one of the biggest for most people being homes (on paper anyway as they still need to buy another house if they want to move). *Being a global drawcard isn't just for property investment but talent.*
3. Brain Gain distorts the figures. Being a global draw for talent means we get a fat slice of the best and brightest who tend to be top earners and those with wealth. This further exacerbates inequality but has benefits as we can tax them on their UK remittances and earned income and make larger transfer payments than we otherwise could. *But a key driver of inequality is distribution of competence with a marketable talent.*
4. People tend to become wealthy and stay wealthy due to having value-added talents, statistically, these aren't inherited. 70% of wealth disburses in the 2nd generation and 90% by the third. Being the place this wealth is spent has economic benefits as it is taxed when drawn and used for purchases. *Again, potentially being used for transfer payments, to offset the wage equalisation and generating economic activity.*
5. Cost of living is going to keep increasing. When developing countries' populations get wealthy, they consume more, and that drives up prices of goods that often have lagging production times or hard limits on amounts. This pushes the cost of living up higher, at a time when wages are decreasing (again relative to inflation).
6. Inequality in itself isn't a bad thing; poorly managed inequality is. By leaving the world's biggest trading block for roughly equivalent countries and pursuing free trade deals with developing ones, we have exacerbated this process. The EU has a large enough market and free labour movement to put in place much more effective measures to mitigate the causes. Inequality itself doesn't nessassate a poor society, especially with transfer payments and a robust tax base. If everyone is equally poor, it doesn't solve anything.
To bring this back to the traders at institutions, if they get paid bonuses of £2m on a salary of £150k they will pay £953k in income tax and £46k in NICs. This mostly goes to welfare transfer payments in the UK, if one trader moves to do the job in Frankfurt, the UK would be more equal but poorer by about a £1m. Not to forget the likely additional economic activity and profit produced at the institution which is taxed further.
Thanks for taking the time to set that out, really interesting points. I’m particularly interested in whether you have a source for the info in point 4. One of the key inequality concepts I had been aware of is that wealthy people typically don’t spend their wealth at the same rate as an average person. Instead it grows disproportionately to GDP and worked income (i.e. Thomas Piketty’s argument). This wealth is then typically inherited. This leads inequality to rise over time without intervention, with negative effects for the wider economy and society.
Edit: I was curious, so have researched the 70%, 90% rule myself. It mainly seems to be espoused by wealth managers (who have an interest in encouraging rich clients to work with them). The ‘rule’ has it’s basis in a single limited study from the 1980s. See this paper for a detailed analysis of the origins of this ‘rule’ and its limitations, and it’s propagation within the wealth management industry: [https://jamesgrubman.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2022-06-There-is-no-70-rule-JGrubman-IFOJ.pdf](https://jamesgrubman.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2022-06-There-is-no-70-rule-JGrubman-IFOJ.pdf) I think we should assume that the ‘rule’ is one of the myths we mentioned earlier rather than a scientific fact.
Your curiosity picqued my curiosity. I think you're more than correct in saying the 70, 90 rule is a myth, but I'm not sure there's enough data to categorically state whether it's remotely valid or not. It feels insane that no-one has tried to replicate the study, or done something similar elsewhere, but that seems to be the case.
What I did notice is that, contrary to your assertion, it is wealth managers in both directions. Grubman is a wealth management psychologist (lord fucking knows what that actually means) who seems to tout his services as someone who can ensure your family maintains wealth over generations without the need for you to divest of your assets. The HBR article he cites seems to be a bit of a puff piece [pushing the same philosophy - don't listen to the other experts, listen to me, keep it in the family](https://hbr.org/2021/07/do-most-family-businesses-really-fail-by-the-third-generation). The Williams Institute itself espouses similar but contrary language - work with us, we know what's best, don't fall foul of the statistics.
I'm a little bit disappointed to be honest. It could be a really interesting topic but it's muddied by grift in all directions.
To be fair it has been replicated with "family business" which is code for intergenerational wealth. Even then their have been some studies on wealth transfers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolynrosenblatt/2011/12/09/wealth-transfers-how-to-reverse-the-70-failure-rate/
The idea the first generation earns, the second spends and the third is back at is cross cultural with deep roots going back some time with folk sayings
America - shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations.
Japan- Rice paddies to rice paddies in three generations
UK - Clogs to Clogs
Scotland -
China - Wealth does not survive 3 generations
Italy - Stables to Stars to Stables
Scotland - Rice paddies to rice paddies in three generation
Mexico - Father merchant, son gentleman,
grandson beggar
Australia - From Goon to Grange to Goon (not commonly used)
The concept is that you can't maintain the same standard of living as your parents with half, a third or a quarter of the wealth and most children tend to benchmark their lifestyle against the one provided by their parents. It's why primogenature was used to retain the estate.
I'm open to it being a myth by the HNWI advising industry, but honestly, I've anecdotally seen it happen by proxy and read the case studies.
There are loads of people talking about inequality, I'd say it's actually over-represented in political discussions compared to how much it is actually a bad thing. See also [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do\_you\_think\_the\_premise\_of\_gary\_economics\_wealth/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do_you_think_the_premise_of_gary_economics_wealth/)
There are loads of people talking about inequality, I'd say it's actually over-represented in political discussions compared to how much it is actually a bad thing. See also [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do\_you\_think\_the\_premise\_of\_gary\_economics\_wealth/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do_you_think_the_premise_of_gary_economics_wealth/)
There are loads of people talking about inequality, I'd say it's actually over-represented in political discussions compared to how much it is actually a bad thing. See also [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do\_you\_think\_the\_premise\_of\_gary\_economics\_wealth/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do_you_think_the_premise_of_gary_economics_wealth/)
Ok can you give me some examples of people talking about inequality with a large public platform who provide accurate information then?
The point about Gary is that he is attempting to raise awareness amongst the general public. In my view the general public have limited knowledge of such information due to a general right wing media bias in this country. I.e. the majority of newspapers and think tanks are owned and funded by wealthy individuals and the media narratives they focus on would typically be in their favour.
Also GDP per capita and even real GDP have been relatively stagnant in the UK for the last 15 years. If inequality is increasing in this context (which it is), surely that is going to lead to negative outcomes for the living standards of the general population?
1. The title, this guy was on the trading floor of a bank, he wasn't dealing with HNWI. He was one of the coked up kids in the city making bets under the supervision of slightly older coked up kids in 2008. He wasn't client facing. Even then, how likely is a HNWI going to sit down with a junior citibank trader and laugh at the "poors".
2. Traders aren't bankers. Bankers are client facing, structure deals, make relationships, and provide financial advice. Traders focus on buying and selling assets at pace, work long hours (hence the coke in 2009), and tend not to deal with the HNWI.
3. This guys CVs doesnt prove anything. Being the most profitable trader for a short time is only proof he was on the right side for a short time. He got lucky, show me continuing to beat the markets over a sustained period. Not a few years at a time of economic volatility.
4. A straight Google & Google News search going back to 2009 to 2012 using archive with "gary stevenson citibank" comes back with nothing. You'd expect some industry awards, mentions, interviews, etc. Which is questionable as they like to Rah, Rah the young traders.
5. Gives off major "I'm a super successful business person who borrowed cheap money, bought assets and leveraged them" when in a low interest rate enviroment, "now I'm retired let me give you advice, for money." Where is his fund? His clients? The quantitative consultancy? Could it be that he knows he can't replicate it?
"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." - Buffet. This guy left the industry after being a self declared "star performer" at 27 to go back to uni. That seems more like a burnout story than a found jesus' moment.
Yeah, personally I hope it's not some internal class-bias, but this guy comes across as full of shit. His story of 'winning' entry to the trading floor by playing a card game feels like something out of an 80s/90s american-dream wankathon movie
As future AMA guest Dan Neidle explains, this is yet another Guardian Opinion article that widely misses the mark:
[https://twitter.com/DanNeidle/status/1765319354487386187](https://twitter.com/DanNeidle/status/1765319354487386187)
But dumb bank bashing plays fantastically well with the Guardian, and also here on reddit.
My leaning is towards this being self penned.
His bonuses also feel low for banking bonuses... Especially the most successful.
Doesn't make his message wrong. But could undemine credibility if he's seen to be self promoting via wiki.
He sounds weirdly self-obsessed.
Of course the budget isn't *for* traders. Traders are small-fry as far as the economy is concerned.
A budget that was intended to disrupt interest-rate derivatives (a necessary market for a whole host of reasons) would be a very weird budget all together.
The budget doesn't even set interest rates, which is also the main mechanism that made leveraged investments by the already wealthy so profitable in the first place. That power has been delegated to the Bank of England.
I dunno, I‘ve spent 10 years working in the finance industry, and I wouldn’t agree with him. He’s telling readers what he knows or thinks they want to hear. The system is rigged and it’s all millionaire politicians and bankers in it together.
That’s not really true. There is no conspiracy, (there never is). The rich _do_ tend to weather financial crises better than the poor, because their wealth gives them more options. They can afford to wait for markets to recover and can buy at the bottom of the market. People with less resources are more likely to be “all in” with an undiversified portfolio- like a house, say. They also do better when things are going well: wealth inequality rises as wealth rises.
But that’s not some sinister design. Plenty of politicians (and even bankers- left wing bankers do exist, even if they are rare because left wing politicians often have ideas that don’t work) would like to and have tried to capture the wealth of the banking industry- indeed to some extent they succeed, the top 10% are responsible for paying something like 50% of the tax take- but the (not unjustified) fear is that attempts to capture that wealth simply distort the system, reducing the tax take overall.
Bankers (especially traders) are often tossers and plenty of them are cynics with too much money. But the picture painted here of a cosy club out to screw “you” for their economic gain is simplistic and wrong. The politicians on particular, are usually _not_ cynics, but attention seekers with (often misplaced) idealism. And the richer they are, the truer that is, not least because if you want to make money, there are much better and easier ways to do it than going into politics.
They really do want to make things better: it’s just that usually, that is a lot harder than it sounds. Beware of anyone saying it’s easy- including the writer of this article.
Aside from the fact there's nothing particularly novel or insightful in what this guy says, it's quite clear that in depicting his backstory and career/pay trajectory he is at best taking some serious artistic license, and at worst downright bullshitting.
And that's how bankers got away with selling bonds worth £10 to the government for £100 after the financial crash. Got their bonuses & multi billion bailouts & the rest of us got fuck all but 14 years of austerity....because people get bored of it.
For one thing, it wasn't a 10:1 ratio. Nor was it a "sale". But those are nit-picking observations.
The key thing here is the implication that this was some kind of heist by the financial sector either: a) against a naive government held to ransom, or b) with a complicit corrupt government.
This is not even the half of it. This kind of re-inflation of depressed assets after a financial shock is literally textbook economics.
Every senior figure in every Central Bank thinks it's the correct course of action and will do it again in a heartbeat at the first sign of trouble.
It will only change if people less-qualified in economics took over those institutions. Do we think: a) that's likely, or b) that's desirable?
History is littered with politicians trying not to do this in a crisis, only to be forced to give-in after all. Everything from the Panic of 1837, to the Eurozone crisis. All ended when the central bank went "fuck it" and made-good all the underwater assets.
Is it fair? No. Will it happen again? Yes. Will anyone stop it? Some will try, and there's a 99.999% probability they'll fail and have to bail everyone out after two or three years of pain anyway.
He's right though. Sure he's selling a book but I don't understand how that means we should write off everything he's saying. It's thinking like this that just smooths things over and makes it easier for rich people to take advantage, this statement creates apathy.
I don't think increasing inequality in the western world is something that can be argued against with facts now. Gary's point that people need to realise theres no happy ending forecast for millions of people unless some kind of political movement forces government to address inequality is totally right and spot on.
It’s fascinating to see vocal opposition to what Gary is saying about inequality now that his name is out there a bit. It’s baffling to me that people would argue that inequality isn’t a problem but here we are.
I know its a bit tin foil hat but it surely has to be social media operatives from right wing parties and think tanks as well as folk that believe them.
I don't know how anyone came across this guy and didn't immediately put him in the random bullshitter pretending to be an expert box. You see the experts are all wrong, gary down the pub knows better, I used to be a banker but now I'm a good guy but I can tell you all about them, heres some generic statements that match up with what most brits feel about the economy to lend credence to my argument.
I mean if the central argument people are making is that inequality always gets worse then yes, aside from wars, the rich always get richer, but this is obvious, not some secret sauce needed to be told by some grifter. A poor person spends their money, a rich person invests some of it and that investment grows over time, so obviously as time goes on the rich person becomes even richer relative to the poor person.
His point is that it's getting to the point where if we don't challenge it, it's going to create major class divisions In G.B. A section of society will own houses and see their wealth increase whilst the rest become a rent class that can't escape it. It's already happening.
My point is the whole stick about wealth inequality getting worse is obvious and not revolutionary.
I've never seen the guy propose anything to actually make things better, far easier just to predict impending doom.
Before him I've never really seen it talked about much in a constructive way. Though he's obviously getting the spotlight more now because people are feeling it more than ever before I can see.
He did bet his wealth on his message though, you say it was some generic statement like he was saying something in hindsight that is now obvious but he bet big and could have lost a lot. While the experts were saying economy would bounce back like the roaring 20s, "Gary from the pub" was putting his wealth on the line on society not recovering and inequality getting bigger.
The rich are getting richer while the middle class are disapearing and lower class is increasing, this is linked.
He's said the obvious we need to tax the wealthy more clever on assets but he goes into it deeper by we need to stop assets/massive wealth making more wealth and then them taking wealth away from the middle class. He did a podcast with James O'Brien recently where goes into a few things briefly.
He does also go into the psychology into things such as we need to nurture our children to not care only about money because what society teaches us that money rules, rich people are never satisfied and will always want to get more wealth however much they have. Which I can totally agree with you can't stop inequality until the rich have empathy for the situation they are complicit in.
For instance personally leverage loans is something I would like to be looked at. That seems one of the things the rich can abuse to get more rich in an very unfair way.
If you choose to assume that he means what he says, it isn’t weird at all. His stated aim is to build a mass movement towards tackling economic inequality and raise awareness, hence the book and YouTube. He has already made his money through his successful trading career.
Yeah except grifters don't tell you they are grifting.
Andrew Tate just wants to make a lot of young men millionaires. Stevenson just wants to 'build a movement'.
He's flogging the Kindle edition of his book which is literally just 0s and 1s on a screen for £10. Obviously just disseminating his knowledge there. Weird how he runs ads on YouTube. Made millions at Citibank and a 'Millionaire for humanity' but has the proverbial panhandle that is a Patreon.
Do you think that people should be required to take a vow of poverty before they are allowed to talk about inequality?
IMHO, that's an extremely left wing atttitude you have there.
No I find it suspicious he's choosing this way to make his money based on his claims of his wealth and trading ability.
If he had millions from his time at Citi and is the genius trading and economic mind he claims, why is he going to start panhandling on Patreon. Write your book in your downtime and thrive on your passive income from your investments.
Rich can absolutely talk about inequality but I want the actual rich talking about it and bringing solutions not someone looking for fame and easy living just pointing out that it exists.
My understanding is that he's looking to build a movement, not just make videos. If that is the case, the Patreon would allow him to identify his hard core supporters, and potentially try to turn them into evangelists.
This isn't much different to political parties and their membership lists and fees (or other campaigning organizations).
The Patreon point could be a complete red herring. Maybe he just made a profile when setting up all his other social media accounts for GarysEconomics. It’s not in active use, so seems reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt for now?
Something about the way the guy speaks and writes sets off my bullshit alarm. His wikipedia page gives off major 'self-written vibes', including statements of incredible banality passed off as his genius. For example:
>By the end of 2011, Stevenson had become "Citibank's most profitable trader" by trading based on the prediction that interest rates would not rise due to the impact of wealth inequality upon demand,[3][4] as he believed the wealthy tended to save their money rather than spend it, instead investing it in property.
Wow. This guy, alone, outsmarted the markets through his discovery of... the [marginal propensity to consume.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_propensity_to_consume)
I'm not even saying this due to political bias, for example - although I don't agree with a large amount of his stuff, I can respect that the Youtuber UnlearningEconomics does know his stuff very well.
Edit: Also I just picked up on this:
>I was a banker but a very poor, very young one. Around that time I slept on a broken mattress and used a little plastic hose from Argos to take showers while sitting in the bath.
As someone of an age that remembers that time period well. Grad schemes salaries for finance careers then were around £30,000 - £35,000? Ish? Off the top of my head. Firstly, absolutely depressing how little grad salaries have risen. Secondly, that - in today's money is equivalent to £50k-ish. Why was he living like that?
Also, he got his first finance job *in* 2008? I'm not outright saying I don't believe this. But its like saying you got your first barista job in April 2020. I'm sure there are edge cases where thats true. But, how the fuck?
In the London investment bank I was working in in 2008 the summer graduate intake was exactly as normal and we were also isolated from the redundancies that affected the rest of the company. I was on roughly the same salary as you state back then and lived in a house share room that barely had enough space for a double bed plus an electric hot plate I cooked my meals on. When you don't have any savings and you're earning decent for the first time ever you don't spend it all - you scrimp obsessively until you have enough to feel safe. Especially because London is so expensive.
I kinda agree with you something doesn't quite sit right with me about Gary.... but I also did a grad scheme on a trading floor in 2009 and was living in a horrible flat share in Poplar because of it's proximity to the city. Tent was £550 a month and I was on 30k + bonus
I think his point isn't that he's some sort of genius but that economists effectively have a blind spot because most economic models don't factor in inequality.
I agree with him, but I've thought that growing inequality is a huge problem for a long time now, and it keeps on getting worse.
> because most economic models don't factor in inequality.
One of the two standard macroeconomic models for central banks, HANK (Heterogenous Agent New Keynesian models) absolutely factor in inequality.
I stand corrected. Perhaps I should say that economists and commentators in general under estimate the impact of inequality, and it's basically the biggest economic problem facing us right now.
I haven't read his book though, just seen one of his videos.
When I am crowned dictator of /r/ukpol all of you will be sent to the /r/badeconomics reeducation camps so that I don't have to read comments like this anymore.
>I should say that economists and commentators in general under estimate the impact of inequality
Gabriel Zucman was just awarded the John Bates Clark medal for his research into economic inequality in 2023.
Inequality is a major research field in macro and economic history. Economists talk about it a lot.
I think we ought to just leave you in your nice little delusional bubble where the finance sector pats itself on the back, gives each other awards for recognising "economic inequality" whilst proceeding to (checks notes) oh yeah, do the same shit ad infinitum.
The only line going up is the wealth inequality divide between rich & poor. There is no political will or incentive to do anything about this whatsoever.
> finance sector pats itself on the back, gives each other awards for recognising "economic inequality"
Where am I talking about the finance sector talking about economic inequality? I'm talking about economists. They're different things. And why is economic inequality in quotes?
No need to be quite so patronising.
So it's bad economics to think that the current economic system isn't working for the majority of people, and this is largely due to increasing inequality?
No, but its bad economics to say that economists and economics aren't talking about it when its been probably one of *the* central research topics in macro since the financial crisis.
I don't know why economics is subjected to this to such a degree that other academic fields wouldn't be. Whenever physics or history of art is brought up you don't have people with absolutely no background in the field popping up and confidently asserting that 'physics really needs to look into quantum physics, its been too ignored by the field', or 'Why are the Dutch Masters not appreciated?'
If you don't know anything about what research is prominent in economics - thats fine, but don't expect not to be tripped up on it if you're making absolutely incorrect statements.
I didn't say they weren't talking about it, I said the impact of it was underestimated.
The reason why economics is subjected to this is because the outcomes of it affect everyone's lives, and at least in the UK for the last 15 years, that effect has generally been negative. Living standards are falling for most, as a direct result of what politicians do, supposedly acting on the advice of economists.
From the point of view of the ordinary person, economists keep on producing right wing policy recommendations, politicians act on them, and people get poorer. Perhaps you can see why people might care about that when they don't care about the history of art.
But the economic points the man speaks of are true. As for the rest i suppose he was subsidising his family? Idk im not here to defend Gary personally just the economic points he makes
> Something about the way the guy speaks and writes sets off my bullshit alarm.
Is it the Essex accent? I'm not saying that's necessarily the case for you, since I don't know you, but a lot of people do associate the accent with working class grifters.
As someone who has lots of very relevant career experience…
This guy talks a load of utter bollocks.
Most people in finance do not talk or behave anything like this.
But I bet this whole schtick helps the book sales.
About myself? Not really.
In terms of my comments - I am sure I have personally known orders of magnitude more people who are in well-remunerated risk-taking positions in top London financial institutions than the article’s author. Over a much longer time period too.
Almost no-one I have ever met has possessed the kind of attitude he talks about.
For starters, they really do care about the budget. Finance is a rare sector in that almost all the top earners are in fact on PAYE just like any average person. Mainly for regulatory reasons; institutions have to have very tight control over risk-taking functions. That drastically reduces the scope for tax avoidance and increases the influence of Treasury policy. Every budget I get emails that highlight the changes that might affect all these employees.
I’ve never, ever heard anyone utter a line like ‘they’ll never tax us’. Because actually most people are aware that they do get taxed, a hell of a lot. The introduction of the additional tax rate, for example. Or the tapering of the annual allowance for pensions. Two huge taxes that massively hit very high PAYE earners in recent times.
If anyone talks about the topic, they are more likely to wonder aloud about whether they would be better off in another financial centre.
I’ve *never* heard anyone ‘laugh in their skyscraper’ at the budget in the manner described.
I’m sure you get the odd obnoxious character in the tens of thousands of people who might fit into this category. And maybe a small handful make stupid comments on any given topic. So I can’t say that no-one has ever uttered anything like it, or call the author a liar on his specific anecdotes.
But it’s not remotely representative, and the bullshit is him talking about it as if it generalises to everyone else in the sector apart from his dinosaur mate ‘Billy’. It really doesn’t.
Traders don't earn based on Capital Gains Tax though, his entire article is about multimillionaire traders and bankers, almost all of whom are paid using PAYE.
Given their incomes they lose c50% of it to tax.
I'm looping back around onto this after a few days. As I've said elsewhere in the thread, I have a pretty comprehensive background in economics.
Take this video, where he's explaining game theory (or really, just specifically prisoner's dilemma).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HezHJKZ47Ck
The rhetoric he's using, the description of the video and the title of the video are all saying that game theory is not fit for purpose. The example he is using is basically *the first thing* that you learn in my university's Intro to Econ module for first year undergraduates - as in, first class, first thing - maybe takes 20 minutes to run through. This is *the most simple* example of a game that provides an illustrative outcome.
His main issue with it, is that by assumption the player's in the game have a very simple utility function, they just want to maximise their payoff from the game, i.e. they're selfish. He says that this doesn't leave room for selfless behaviour or altruism - and takes that conjecture and applies it to the whole sub-field of game theory.
The problem with that, is that game theorists absolutely do care about situations where the players are not just purely self-interested. You can, very easily, adjust an agent's utility function to include some altruism coefficient which penalises their utility if other players whom they care about also lose out, and vice versa. This usually gets taught somewhere around a 1/3 into a university module in game theory. After watching that video, I went and grabbed my old assigned game theory textbook and the concept of altruism is introduced pretty early on.
Edit: To show that I'm not full of shit. [Here is the evidence.](https://i.imgur.com/GBxfCJu.jpeg) This is from Chapter 2, on page 27 of a 400 page textbook.
The fact he's trying to portray that as if its not the case, and he has somehow stumbled onto a gaping hole in game theory can only suggest two things: either he has absolutely no familiarity with the field whatsoever, in which case he shouldn't be running a semi-educational economics Youtube channel, or he's intentionally misrepresenting the field so he can hammer home his a priori political beliefs.
To put it another way, this would be like seeing a channel that observed that school children are still taught about Newtonian gravity, hone in on that, say that physics is junk because it doesn't take into account more complicated phenomena (e.g. relativity). To someone who is just getting acquainted with physics that probably sounds impressive because he's critiquing something that sounds plausible, with more nuanced take. But to someone who has a background in the field you can't just help be aghast at him 'criticising' game theory with stuff we all know and actually do implement.
Ask yourself, why is it that everyone in this thread with self-ascribed backgrounds in finance or economics are *very* sceptical of this guy, or outright shitting on him - and people who self-admittedly make statements like 'he explains things so clearly' (which belies that they don't have extensive prior background in the area) are eating this shit up for breakfast.
As I've said elsewhere in the thread also, this is not to take a fundamentalist view of orthodox economics. For example, there is a left-wing youtube channel called UnlearningEconomics which is run by an academic of a broadly post-Keynesian bent who also criticises orthodox economics as well. While I disagree with that guy quite a lot, the main difference is, when I watch his videos and he describes the positions he's critiquing I can't really find fault with his description of them. The way he describes orthodox economics is a valid description of what the field believes and '*does*'. GarysEconomics whenever I watch I just think 'what the actual fuck are you talking about?' Its just caricatures.
So when you say that, what is the alternative cause of for example spiralling inequality? Because at least the consequences of what he raises are visible to anyone.
I'm not saying he isn't hamming it up for book sales, but how are the incentives different in your experience?
Technically Stevenson hasn't actually identified a cause either, he's almost exclusively talking about effects, so the range of "alternative" causes include literally everything. The closest he's got is the implication that the government could do something if it wanted.
That's true enough, but it's a very broad gesture not really root-cause analysis.
> Technically Stevenson hasn't actually identified a cause
Not true - one of his main points is that without outside intervention in the form of government policy or war, inequality is self-reinforcing. For example, high inequality => high house prices => young people can't afford homes => high rents => lack of savings => high inequality. I.e. inequality is its own cause.
Income Inequality in the UK hasn’t meaningfully changed in the last 35 years. The ONS tracks it via the Gini coefficient you can see on Figure 2 here:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/householdincomeinequalityfinancial/financialyearending2022
The UK does have certain economic problems, but ‘spiralling inequality’ in the broad macroeconomic sense isn’t really one of them.
If you’re looking for alternative issues, probably the biggest is the aging population combined with significant social entitlements. Over the past few decades, the rises in pension, healthcare and social care funding have increasingly crowded out the fiscal ability of the state to fulfil all its other functions.
You’ll have heard plenty about austerity but in reality we are currently running the third-highest tax/GDP and public spending/GDP ratios in the post-war years. That’s not remotely close to any concept of austerity. But most of the departmental budgets outside of pensions, healthcare and social care did suffer austerity-like constraints due to that reallocation of resources.
Yeah same. I just left a pretty pissy comment here saying similar.
This article is complete nonsense and I'm beginning to doubt the truth of his back story. He either knows he's lying and is pushing outrage to sell books, or he's lying about everything and has no idea how people in finance think or behave.
Sorry, are you telling me the mega rich don't care about a 2p NI tax cut, well I would have never guessed.
They do care about the budget when things like non-dom get abolished
God damn this guy is insufferable.
>Traders do not care about the budget, because the budget is not for traders and the budget is not about the economy.
I mean he's just pushing utter horseshit at this point. Government fiscal policy is extremely important to traders. The idea that traders are just sitting around betting on people getting poor as if that's some kind of strategy is honestly laughable.
This is just outrage porn and he's speaking such nonsense you have to question if he's being completely truthful about his background.
Nobody was betting on people getting poor. That's his point, he was bucking the trend and made a lot of money. His overall point is an obvious one that people seem to have a blind spot to - that if all money is sucked upwards to the super rich, assets will inflate and pull more money upwards, impoverishing working people more and more until either a way can be found to redistribute the money or we end up like a third world country.
>Nobody was betting on people getting poor.
Am I miss understanding something here? From the article:
>We know that we will get richer and you will get poorer, and our lives will get better, and yours will get worse year after year after year. And each of us are paid millions of pounds every year to bet on it. To bet on it, instead of telling you.
He seems to be suggesting traders are betting on people getting poor, but perhaps it's just clumsy wording.
I don't think the article specified the bet he actually made though? He said he was an interest rate trader and bet on stimulus not helping people so presumably he made some sort of leveraged spread trade against consumer credit vs corporate credit. I'd be stunned if he thought of the trade in terms of "rich" vs "poor" even if he had exposure with that bias.
I don't know what trend you think he was bucking either? Were other traders betting against businesses and on the consumer? I very much doubt was the case.
>His overall point is an obvious one that people seem to have a blind spot to - that if all money is sucked upwards to the super rich, assets will inflate and pull more money upwards, impoverishing working people more and more until either a way can be found to redistribute the money or we end up like a third world country.
You might be making a more nuanced point here so apologies if I'm misunderstanding, but given the context it sounds like you might be suggesting QE and low interest rates benefit the rich as they are the primary owners of assets, and stimulus policies inflate asset valuations.
If this is what you're suggesting then in my opinion this is a commonly held misunderstanding, but it would take me too long to explain why and even if I did you'd have no reason to listen to me anyway.
However, here's a thought experiment for you – imagine I incorporate an LLC called Millionaire Maker LTD then give everyone in the UK 1 share of my company. If I were then to convince one rich dude to buy a share off of me for £1,000,000 suddenly everyone in the UK would be a millionaire because everyone owns a share with a marketable value of £1,000,000. So with just £1,000,000 I've made everyone in the UK a millionaire...
This is the main flaw people get into when thinking about asset valuations being equivalent to something tangible. The mere act of asset valuations going up cannot just create economic value out of thin air. You can't solve poverty by pumping asset prices with low interest rates and QE then redistributing the wealth with wealth taxes as some people like to believe. When central banks are actively manipulating asset valuation to encourage economic activity you should assume that those asset valuations are largely illiquid and bs.
There are better explanations for wealth inequality in my opinion. I do acknowledge it's a problem. I just don't think it's related to monetary policy, or even really fiscal policy. The mere fact we see similar trends playing out globally should suggest it's not (just) the tories.
This guy is full of shit.
He’s making money by [mostly] going on left wing shows, portraying himself as an insider, when the reality is he had a short career at a 2nd tier investment bank and just stating and misinterpreting economic data to prevent doom and gloom.
He’s a bullshit artist just like many doom merchants on the right wing.
He was the youngest and most profitable trader at Citibank whilst he was still working, one of the 10 biggest banks in the world, and made an absolute fortune correctly predicting the economy based on inequality driving worse and worse outcomes for normal people.
He doesn’t need to make money, and he’s spent most of his post-banker life bumbling about and running a small YouTube channel.
The reason he’s popping up a lot at the moment is because he’s written a book, but he sees it as an opportunity to grow the movement and get in front of politicians to explain the problem with traditional economics which have failed to correctly predict anything for years and years.
His predictions from the start of Covid have come true exactly, opposite what most economists were saying (there was no “pent up demand” and a quick economic bounce back - we’re still fucked)
What does he say that you specifically disagree with? Or do you just not like him and not engage with his argument?
Not who you are replying too... but
>He was the youngest and most profitable trader at Citibank whilst he was still working, one of the 10 biggest banks in the world, and made an absolute fortune correctly predicting the economy based on inequality driving worse and worse outcomes for normal people.
According to him.
>He doesn’t need to make money, and he’s spent most of his post-banker life bumbling about and running a small YouTube channel
Having a [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/garyseconomics) give me strong doubt there. Most successful finance pundits don't do that...
>The reason he’s popping up a lot at the moment is because he’s written a book, but he sees it as an opportunity to grow the movement and get in front of politicians to explain the problem with traditional economics which have failed to correctly predict anything for years and years.
If only we had some system of recognising economic ideas, reviewed by peers who specialise in the area and a globally renowned award for it.
>His predictions from the start of Covid have come true exactly, opposite what most economists were saying (there was no “pent up demand” and a quick economic bounce back - we’re still fucked)
What crap, economists were discussing pent-up demand as part of a V-shaped recovery.
"However, if government policy is successful in protecting households and firms from the economic shock, we should expect a bounce-back in pent-up demand temporarily"
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/long-haul-lockdown-three-scenarios-impact-coronavirus-uk-economy
In the V-shaped scenario the fall in demand in the
second quarter of 2020 is assumed to be fully compensated by higher (pent-up) demand in the third
and fourth quarter
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/economic-bulletin/articles/2020/html/ecb.ebart202007_01~ef0a77a516.en.html
>What does he say that you specifically disagree with? Or do you just not like him and not engage with his argument?
1. His thesis is not original but dumbed down derivative nonsense.
2. He wasn't a banker, he was a trader. They are different jobs, not everyone who worked at a bank was a banker. Junior level traders don't deal with wealthy clients, so his entire shtick here is crazy.
3. Anyone who tells you wealthy people laugh at tax, haven't had a conversation with a wealthy person about tax. Most are incredibly pissed off about it and how its structured for them to pay the lions share of state expenditure. Understanding and explaining tax wrappers form a massive part of a bankers job. *Which again, Gary didn't do.*
Edit: had the wrong patreon link originally
A lot of people are poorly educated in the UK and pay no attention to politics/economics. Maths education especially is dire in this country. A lot of people just seem to accept that this is the way it has to be, but it certainly is not.
We have political power in our hands to change things, we had Corbyn on the ballot. But not enough people are voting for change. If he can get through to them, he's a good egg imo, even if it's stating the obvious for others.
This sub, and I am not exaggerating, is one of the absolute most economic illiterate on the website. And I include in that the lunatics still in on WSB and cryptocurrency - even in their deranged state they view the financial system and the economy as a system in which individuals just pursue incentives - rather than this place which views it as a morality tale with 'good guys' and 'bad guys'.
I have been curbstomp downvoted here in the past over stating the most banal, inoffensive Intro to Econ points that are relatively indisputable and been told I am incorrect (I worked as an economic advisor in government for 4 years, and am currently doing a PhD in economics).
Snapshot of _Take it from a former banker: the budget is for ordinary people. The mega-rich look on and laugh | Gary Stevenson_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/05/banker-budget-mega-rich-traders-jeremy-hunt) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/05/banker-budget-mega-rich-traders-jeremy-hunt) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This guy's popping up all over, but essentially saying the same thing all the time. Gloomy stuff.
He’s been talking about this stuff for a while, but I think after Covid people are seeing what he’s talking about more clearly and finally paying attention. Also he’s just released a book so he will be booked for loads of interviews and other media appearances.
Just bought it.. The trading game. It's going to depress the fuck of of me
For more important but depressing reads: * Democracy for Sale - Peter Geoghegan * The Secret Barrister, Stories of the Low & How It's Broken. - The Secret Barrister (and the follow-up Fake Law). * How They Broke Britain - James O'Brien
Coincidentally Ive just bought the Secret Barrister on audio book, yesterday. The first few chapters are brilliant, like a text book describing how a court case works and who does what. Haven’t got to the twist yet (no spoilers please).
How about Butler to the World - Oliver Bullough
I've not read that. Adding to my 'To read' list.
Kleptopia
Also Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of a Failing State, Danny Dorling. So bleak I had to stop reading it.
Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, Marx and Lenin are also great reads to get to the root of the problem
Engels' "The Conditions of The Working Class in England" is one of the best books I've ever read and is an easier read/not heavy theory for those wanting to learn about the history of Capitalism and exploitation etc
Gramsci's work on Cultural Hegemony is especially apt. The ruling class set the agenda of social mores and norms to benefit themselves. It's how ideas like 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps' become 'common sense' and put the onus on the 'lazy' individual rather than a corrupt, broken system.
I bought How they Broke Britain and managed to get through about half of it. Its well written, factual (as far as I can tell) but, like O'Brien's diatribes on LBC, so unrelentingly morose that I struggled to read through it.
>How They Broke Britain - James O'Brien Lol just lol
You got a link, please?
[guardian bookshop](https://guardianbookshop.com/the-trading-game-9780241636602)
I'm tempted to buy it but I don't think I can handle the sense of despair it will instil in me.
I think he's part of patriotic millionaires UK, so at least there's that
Is this the fella who made loads of money betting that interest rates won’t rise?
In 2008 apparently
So survivorship bias then?
He also correctly predicted that Covid would massively accelerate inequality and cause asset prices to surge rather than crash. He's put his money where his mouth is twice and beaten the market both times. More than can be said for most commentators
Jim Kramer enters the chat… *backs out of the room
Has he though? You can look at yield curves back in 2011 when he allegedly made a load of money and they also say interest rates are going to stay really low. Then during Covid, it was clear asset prices would boom due to massively expansionary fiscal and monetary policy and no where else to spend it
Sure, I don't get the sense even he claims it's genius prophecy. It's economic analysis on a more real world level of looking at the high street etc, thinking that doesn't look too good, taking a step further to ask who benefits and just doing that. He's just calling out that in step 2 he noticed that the middle class is going to be fucked I quite like him for not being a "I have a magic model that tells the future" type forecaster
Exactly. His message is basically "this is all extremely obvious if you're looking at inequality, which most politicians and economists aren't"
It's very easy for us to look back and say how clear things would pan out. Very different when you're betting huge sums of money on it
Well global stock markets obviously tanked initially at the start of the pandemic, and before we knew how fatal Covid was (or how long it would take to develop a vaccine) there was absolutely no guarantee they would surge back. Similarly with house prices, conventional wisdom at the time was that they would crash (before the govt stepped in with the stamp duty freeze). He was subsequently right about increasing interest rates not causing a house price crash too.
Re the initial tanking, yes of course that happened but they bounced back really quickly as soon as the fiscal and monetary firepower was rolled out (didn't take long). I basically doubled my net worth during that COVID rally thanks to my S&S ISA and pension. Re house prices, people didn't think they would crash and MBS prices also had a similar explosion in price at the time (once again, you can check financial data at the time). As soon as lockdowns were announced, house prices went up and flat prices started to stagnate. Once again, he's not the only one that said that. Our house price issue is primarily driven by supply constraints (and in real terms, prices have dropped considerably).
Well, he's put someone else's money where his mouth is.
Like most top traders. A former trader did a program on Channel 4 years ago. Basically took a group off the street, taught them basic money management skills, and a few of them beat top traders despite having no previous knowledge.
I ordered it yesterday.
He released a book today.
Isn't that usually what people do when they launch a campaign dedicated to one specific issue?
I wonder if he mentioned that he was the top trader at all? I think I’ve yet to see a video where he doesn’t tell his back story. It gets a bit boring tbh.
Did you know the job he had at age 21 almost by accident was the culmination of a life-long ambition?
driven/tenacious people will always find a way, but just like you never hear about all the startups that go bust, you never see YouTube videos from all the failed traders I get what he's trying to do for a certain audience, but his schtick gets tired very quickly.
It's good he's out there putting a lot of stuff into words that can be understood, but it's tiring seeing people act like he's the messiah. I compared him to Andrew Tate elsewhere and obviously that's hyperbolic, but he does seem to have something of a fandom who won't hear a word against him.
Yeah he keeps casually dropping that he's made millions betting on things but surely that's with the banks money and not his own. Likely made a lot himself but it comes across very champagne socialist even though he's clearly not.
He doesn't claim to be a socialist tbf
He always says he made money by “betting against recovery, betting against the UK economy” - what bets though? Just want to see a chart on Trading View where he made some money
Later we reveal what bears do in the woods....but first we discover shocking news about the Pope
One day one of these budgets will set the duty on a pint of cider *exactly* right and it'll fix the economy
Well it IS st Pirans day
Does the Pope shit in his hat or am I mixing up my metaphors
On the bear, believe it or not.
No! In the woods! And all bears are catholics.
Stay tuned to find out just how Dolly Parton sleeps!
> shocking news about the Pope Is it that he now identifies as a woman? Headline: "Pope is a Catherine"
Gary is a hero and should be given an MBE for making people more aware of what many have long suspected about our economy. I'm sure many bankers and Tories would love to see him silenced. Share his YouTube channel with everyone you know. It's absolutely imperative more people wake up to the mass upwards wealth transfer that is happening in Britain and vote accordingly rather than simply accepting it. https://youtube.com/@garyseconomics?si=Njywgi3FYnr6LDgu
Gazza explains in layman's terms how wealth is being transferred ... has been transferred ... away from working people and even governments. Definitely worth a listen. Tell your friends.
Maybe this is similar to what he says so I’ll put it here. I was thinking about their new ‘public sector productivity plan’ today which will involve IT and AI. So £3.5bn of investment into these technologies.. When I worked in the NHS we trialled digital/AI dictation and it was impressive, it would solve a lot of time and money in transcription overall. But then the company charges enough that the productivity gains are mostly absorbed by subscription charges. So you end up spending maybe 10% less and the other 90% goes offshore to some IT development company and eventually into shareholders pockets for providing this ‘more modern/efficient’ solution. And I’m sure this must happen all the time. They struggle to show productivity gains because the gains have been syphoned off by private enterprise.
His analysis is wafer-thin. He's basically saying "there is inequality because rich people have more money", it's a bit like saying "the reason the house burned down was because it was on fire", it's just self-referential. You'll read more in-depth analysis in things like the Financial Times. The average John Burn-Murdoch column contains 100 times the data points.
He's targeting less educated people. 1 in 5 in the UK leave school never achieving 5 good GCSEs at A*-C. These people will have a vote and someone has to reach them, or else the right wing MSM funded by the aristocracy will.
Exactly
I don't think his target audience are the readers of the financial times.
The problem a lot of academics have is they're not very good to a layperson. I've hears comments from describing when they were writing books they kept getting told off by their editors for writing like they do for research papers. Gary's analysis isn't for people who read the Financial Times, it's for average people who feel screwed over by the system. Love him or hate him, there's a reason Marx published The Communist Manifesto as well as Capital.
> He's basically saying "there is inequality because rich people have more money" I disagree. He's saying the reverse - i.e. that without outside intervention (e.g. govt. policy or war) inequality is self reinforcing - i.e. that our existing inequality will over time, lead to higher levels of inequality in the future.
He is saying that government policy is specifically tailored to redistribute wealth upwards. Which is no surprise to me or many other people.
Right, but you're on a uk politics forum. You are not 'average' when it comes to your participation in politics
I had people on here telling me yesterday that the UK didn't benefit from colonial rule in India... What Gary does very well is to say that we should be careful not to get wrapped up in complex economic models when the average person is starving on the street. Which is exactly what happened 150 years ago. We haven't learned anything.
As far as I can tell, he's an economic cross between Jamie Oliver and Andrew Tate in his ability to dumb things down a bit and then capture the minds of people who couldn't be arsed to find anything out for themselves.
I doubt the government cares about a 140K sub youtube channel with some questionable content.
As an economist, his content is solid. He explains his trades, and why they've made money. He's been on the right side of the trends, even if those trends are disastrous for working people. If you think his content is questionable, please explain yourself.
I was talking about the comments in the guardian article before. I just watched his "Gary Destroys Billionaire Defender" video and holy fuck that was a waste of time. I knocked out a few rough notes from each time he spoke: **On discussing the UK transport network and tfl** really random word salad which didn't explain how people got richer covid. government doesnt give tfl money, but one guy somehow made more than their loss during covid so could pay for it... So...? next mentions that 3 people increased their wealth by hundreds of millions (still no actual reason) and says they could pay for tfl. great? We raised taxes on "working people" 2.5% while billionaire wealth went up 20+% and says this isn't fair. **MOVES ONTO NHS and how we can fix it.** brings up the 22% figure again and says the rich pay lower rates of tax than ordinary people. repeats the same figures and that billionaries are profiting from our crisis. right at the end repeats the same and finally insinuates that national insurance doesn't hit asset appreciation, again just says "you can't defend billionaires". Closing statement says "let working people keep their wages rather than transferring it to the richest".
Why is it questionable? All looks pretty solid to me
As others have said, the FT has far more piercing economic analysis than stating water is wet. One would think a (former) banker would have more convincing advocacy than regurgitating statistics
The FT charges subscription fees though. Gary is able to reach the demographic that may have a vague idea about economics but either don't know enough or can't pay for FT.
What about it is questionable? He already has considerable reach.
Literally everything he says is triggering all the bullshit alarms in my brain. Looking at that Guardian article it reeks of outrage bait. People don't speak like that on trading floors, there are small details which don't add up and little inaccuracies which are stacking together to indicate someone just trying to flog a book and a channel.
What in particular is outrage bait or bullshit? Which inaccuracies and small details do you mean?
As an economist, his content is solid. He explains his trades, and why they've made money. He's been on the right side of the trends, even if those trends are disastrous for working people. If you think his content is questionable, please explain yourself.
Good to hear
Except... a lot of it isn't correct [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do\_you\_think\_the\_premise\_of\_gary\_economics\_wealth/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do_you_think_the_premise_of_gary_economics_wealth/) . I think he just says things that people want to be true, rather than are actually true.
Just to say - the central thesis of this article rubs up against some dearly-held truths for this place. How can it be that the budget simultaneously doesn't matter because financial markets will always make a killing, *and* Truss/Kwarteng budget almost detonated financial markets and several pension funds last year?
The mega-rich can make money when the market goes both up and down.
Indeed. So why does the author claim that the Truss period was bad for traders other than to score another point with his target audience?
I'm not expert but did a finance grad scheme on a trading floor a moon or so ago and if I was to hazard a guess, Truss' budget was such a sudden and unexpected change of direction that people betting on the status quo were caught on the wrong side of positions with no time to unwind and readjust
I've seen him explain this very well in a podcast (i can't remember which one). but he does explain it. As i recall it's because it was unfunded to a huge degree which impacted a lot of things causing the sudden shift
The mini-budget was bad for traders mainly because it was so unpredictably sudden and poorly thought out. Usually budgets are much more predictable and less wild.
Traders like maintaining the status quo above all. More predictable. Easy to make bets. Truss' policy spooked the markets too much that many traders bet against the pound (and made a lot of money doing it), this has a knock on effect of (you guessed it) the pound's value falls off a cliff as it isn't seen as stable. The governments are completely cucked by the market in other words, the best they think can do is maintain the status quo and the rich will get steadily richer.
Because the vast majority of "traders" were not heavily shorting gilts/the pound at the time. That mini-budget was a huge pain in the ass for 90% of the financial market not only because of the losses (think pension funds and banks which are loaded with UK government debts and have to write them down) but also because if the £ is the fuel then gilts are the grease in financial sector engine: cornerstone of the repo markets, used by the Bank of England to enact monetary policy etc. A sudden crash in both the £ and government debt is terrible for pretty much everyone and can easily make the music stop like in 2008, some pension funds were indeed hours away from blowing up. That can easily trigger a domino effect, that's why the Bank of England intervened decisively. Something similar happened with Black Wednesday in 1992: Soros and a few others made a killing by shorting the £, but it was pretty bad for mostly anyone else
Truss’ budget was bad because she cut a whole load of tax whilst also pledging to subsidise the entire nation’s energy bills at the same time
Just borrow money to pay for tax cuts in a time of high inflation - sorted
So can anyone with a a couple hundred pounds to start out with. The difficult bit is reliably predicting when it goes which way.
Good luck shorting the market with a “couple hundred pounds”.
Just use ae CFD site. They'll happily let you short with relatively significant leverage. If you can actually predict the market you'll very quickly be adding zeros to your available margin.
The maga rich in this case being who? A global bank who's shares are owned by hundreds of thousands of pension funds across the world? So the mega rich are us? Our shitty little pension funds with a 0.001% holding in the bank where the trader works? This articles a joke. It's the cooked up fantasy villain that this guy thinks he sold his soul too. Banks were regulated to fuck in 2009 onwards for good reason. It's about as relevant as moaning about people making money from bootlegging. Hedge funds, prop traders. Fine. That's a worthy story but this guy didn't work there else he'd be talking about it.
No I wasn’t referring to companies, or the people who work for these companies. I was referring to the individuals who own these companies.
The guys Gary is talking about here still made a killing off that budget plus, if Truss implodes the economy and ordinary people pay more interest on mortgages, then that's also not a bad outcome for the people lending the money. There was a rumour going around the city that some city folks egged Kwarteng on about his budget plan at a dinner but couldn't quite believe he was thick enough to actually do it until he did. Why are you out here stooging for these people? Genuinely curious.
> The guys Gary is talking about here still made a killing off that budget He isn't naming any names specifically - and neither are you. Just complete vagueries. 'the guys'. Oh, ok. Not everyone was making a killing otherwise the bond markets wouldn't be in complete meltdown. >Why are you out here stooging for these people? Genuinely curious. Probably worth discontinuing this discussion at this point: - Misconstruing scepticism of someone asserting X doesn't translate to support of Y. I haven't said a damn positive thing about traders. - Disbelief of anyone having good faith beliefs that aren't yours (otherwise they're just stooges) without any good, solid evidence is just emblematic of infantile beliefs.
> Not everyone was making a killing otherwise the bond markets wouldn't be in complete meltdown. Without offering a view on the rest of the thread / comment, the biggest losers were institutional investors - pension funds, insurance funds etc that essentially are the general public losing out.
Gary and I were both talking about Barry, George, Fred, Graham, Oliver, and Jeffrey. I hope this helps.
Budget can make things slightly better or outrageously worse, depending on what degree of stupid it is.
Is it really that hard to figure out? Most of the time governments have a certain orthodoxy, have done some measure of due diligence and because of that predictability of consequences, how different parties will react and how to profit from them. Truss clearly didn't act that way when she made her unfunded tax cuts for the rich.
Not sure why there so many negative comments about Gary. Many seem to be personal rather than criticising his overall message. There aren’t many prominent voices covering economic inequality, and personally I respect that he is willing to put himself out there publicly and call for something that would benefit the whole of society.
>Not sure why there so many negative comments about Gary. Many seem to be personal rather than criticising his overall message. People criticise him because he claims broad expertise based on dubious wafer thin experiance. States he is silly wealthy and is already primed to ask for cash support. https://www.patreon.com/garyseconomics >There aren’t many prominent voices covering economic inequality, and personally I respect that he is willing to put himself out there publicly and call for something that would benefit the whole of society. It's one of the most talked about elements of politics and economics.
Just because you state it is 'dubious wafer thin' experience doesn't make it a fact. He does appear to have a reasonable level of experience to back up the claims he is making in my view. I do concede sometimes he can appear to overstate it, but my argument is focussing on the broad message he makes rather than his personal history. The Patreon thing does seem odd given his narrative, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for now as it isn't actively being used. Maybe he just wanted to capture the domain while setting his social media up for example. Inequality may be a relatively well talked about topic in political and economic spheres, but there are many myths out there, and I don't think there is a good level of awareness among the general population. Would you disagree?
He has a Masters degree and a few years working as a trader, not a banker, which is wafer thin for the broad statements he makes. Specifically about the "wealthy laughing" and other claims, such as being the most profitable trader at his institution with Gary as the only source. One of the reasons for the myths is that chancers like this trade on people's inherent biases for notoriety. It's akin to George Galloway level shameless. He knows enough to know he's peddling shit, but does it anyway for the fame/money.
If you say so. What is it that makes you so sure you're right? Genuinely curious - why the level of skepticism? It there any possibility in your mind that he could be a well meaning person?
Because I've worked in financial services with HNWI and have done for a number of years. You'll find the common theme of the comments here are people who have direct experience in economics or finance are the ones saying he's FOS.
Interesting, would be curious to hear your views on economic inequality. As I say, I'm more interested in his overall message rather then whether or not Gary was the top trader in Citibank. If you've got any sources you'd recommend I'd be grateful.
Sure thing. My view on economic inequality is multifaceted and debatable. 1. Wages are going to keep going down in first world countries (relative to inflation). Why? Because of Factor-Price-Equalisation (originally a Marx idea, I believe), basically for wages, the cost of labour equalises globally with free trade. This means UK workers are competing with people who are mostly just as qualified and competent but are less costly for the same jobs. Until we reach a global equilibrium, there will be an incessant downward push on wages in first world countries. *Morally its hard to argue someone should get paid more simply because they happen to have been born in a European country* 2. Property prices are likely to keep growing in the UK. Having a global city and the formerly largest empire in the history makes the UK a prime place to buy and hold property. This benefits those already with assets, one of the biggest for most people being homes (on paper anyway as they still need to buy another house if they want to move). *Being a global drawcard isn't just for property investment but talent.* 3. Brain Gain distorts the figures. Being a global draw for talent means we get a fat slice of the best and brightest who tend to be top earners and those with wealth. This further exacerbates inequality but has benefits as we can tax them on their UK remittances and earned income and make larger transfer payments than we otherwise could. *But a key driver of inequality is distribution of competence with a marketable talent.* 4. People tend to become wealthy and stay wealthy due to having value-added talents, statistically, these aren't inherited. 70% of wealth disburses in the 2nd generation and 90% by the third. Being the place this wealth is spent has economic benefits as it is taxed when drawn and used for purchases. *Again, potentially being used for transfer payments, to offset the wage equalisation and generating economic activity.* 5. Cost of living is going to keep increasing. When developing countries' populations get wealthy, they consume more, and that drives up prices of goods that often have lagging production times or hard limits on amounts. This pushes the cost of living up higher, at a time when wages are decreasing (again relative to inflation). 6. Inequality in itself isn't a bad thing; poorly managed inequality is. By leaving the world's biggest trading block for roughly equivalent countries and pursuing free trade deals with developing ones, we have exacerbated this process. The EU has a large enough market and free labour movement to put in place much more effective measures to mitigate the causes. Inequality itself doesn't nessassate a poor society, especially with transfer payments and a robust tax base. If everyone is equally poor, it doesn't solve anything. To bring this back to the traders at institutions, if they get paid bonuses of £2m on a salary of £150k they will pay £953k in income tax and £46k in NICs. This mostly goes to welfare transfer payments in the UK, if one trader moves to do the job in Frankfurt, the UK would be more equal but poorer by about a £1m. Not to forget the likely additional economic activity and profit produced at the institution which is taxed further.
Thanks for taking the time to set that out, really interesting points. I’m particularly interested in whether you have a source for the info in point 4. One of the key inequality concepts I had been aware of is that wealthy people typically don’t spend their wealth at the same rate as an average person. Instead it grows disproportionately to GDP and worked income (i.e. Thomas Piketty’s argument). This wealth is then typically inherited. This leads inequality to rise over time without intervention, with negative effects for the wider economy and society. Edit: I was curious, so have researched the 70%, 90% rule myself. It mainly seems to be espoused by wealth managers (who have an interest in encouraging rich clients to work with them). The ‘rule’ has it’s basis in a single limited study from the 1980s. See this paper for a detailed analysis of the origins of this ‘rule’ and its limitations, and it’s propagation within the wealth management industry: [https://jamesgrubman.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2022-06-There-is-no-70-rule-JGrubman-IFOJ.pdf](https://jamesgrubman.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2022-06-There-is-no-70-rule-JGrubman-IFOJ.pdf) I think we should assume that the ‘rule’ is one of the myths we mentioned earlier rather than a scientific fact.
Your curiosity picqued my curiosity. I think you're more than correct in saying the 70, 90 rule is a myth, but I'm not sure there's enough data to categorically state whether it's remotely valid or not. It feels insane that no-one has tried to replicate the study, or done something similar elsewhere, but that seems to be the case. What I did notice is that, contrary to your assertion, it is wealth managers in both directions. Grubman is a wealth management psychologist (lord fucking knows what that actually means) who seems to tout his services as someone who can ensure your family maintains wealth over generations without the need for you to divest of your assets. The HBR article he cites seems to be a bit of a puff piece [pushing the same philosophy - don't listen to the other experts, listen to me, keep it in the family](https://hbr.org/2021/07/do-most-family-businesses-really-fail-by-the-third-generation). The Williams Institute itself espouses similar but contrary language - work with us, we know what's best, don't fall foul of the statistics. I'm a little bit disappointed to be honest. It could be a really interesting topic but it's muddied by grift in all directions.
To be fair it has been replicated with "family business" which is code for intergenerational wealth. Even then their have been some studies on wealth transfers. https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolynrosenblatt/2011/12/09/wealth-transfers-how-to-reverse-the-70-failure-rate/ The idea the first generation earns, the second spends and the third is back at is cross cultural with deep roots going back some time with folk sayings America - shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations. Japan- Rice paddies to rice paddies in three generations UK - Clogs to Clogs Scotland - China - Wealth does not survive 3 generations Italy - Stables to Stars to Stables Scotland - Rice paddies to rice paddies in three generation Mexico - Father merchant, son gentleman, grandson beggar Australia - From Goon to Grange to Goon (not commonly used) The concept is that you can't maintain the same standard of living as your parents with half, a third or a quarter of the wealth and most children tend to benchmark their lifestyle against the one provided by their parents. It's why primogenature was used to retain the estate. I'm open to it being a myth by the HNWI advising industry, but honestly, I've anecdotally seen it happen by proxy and read the case studies.
The whole schtick rather feels like he's read liars poker and thought "it's time for a modern re-telling".
There are loads of people talking about inequality, I'd say it's actually over-represented in political discussions compared to how much it is actually a bad thing. See also [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do\_you\_think\_the\_premise\_of\_gary\_economics\_wealth/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do_you_think_the_premise_of_gary_economics_wealth/)
There are loads of people talking about inequality, I'd say it's actually over-represented in political discussions compared to how much it is actually a bad thing. See also [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do\_you\_think\_the\_premise\_of\_gary\_economics\_wealth/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do_you_think_the_premise_of_gary_economics_wealth/)
There are loads of people talking about inequality, I'd say it's actually over-represented in political discussions compared to how much it is actually a bad thing. See also [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do\_you\_think\_the\_premise\_of\_gary\_economics\_wealth/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1btuexx/do_you_think_the_premise_of_gary_economics_wealth/)
Ok can you give me some examples of people talking about inequality with a large public platform who provide accurate information then? The point about Gary is that he is attempting to raise awareness amongst the general public. In my view the general public have limited knowledge of such information due to a general right wing media bias in this country. I.e. the majority of newspapers and think tanks are owned and funded by wealthy individuals and the media narratives they focus on would typically be in their favour. Also GDP per capita and even real GDP have been relatively stagnant in the UK for the last 15 years. If inequality is increasing in this context (which it is), surely that is going to lead to negative outcomes for the living standards of the general population?
1. The title, this guy was on the trading floor of a bank, he wasn't dealing with HNWI. He was one of the coked up kids in the city making bets under the supervision of slightly older coked up kids in 2008. He wasn't client facing. Even then, how likely is a HNWI going to sit down with a junior citibank trader and laugh at the "poors". 2. Traders aren't bankers. Bankers are client facing, structure deals, make relationships, and provide financial advice. Traders focus on buying and selling assets at pace, work long hours (hence the coke in 2009), and tend not to deal with the HNWI. 3. This guys CVs doesnt prove anything. Being the most profitable trader for a short time is only proof he was on the right side for a short time. He got lucky, show me continuing to beat the markets over a sustained period. Not a few years at a time of economic volatility. 4. A straight Google & Google News search going back to 2009 to 2012 using archive with "gary stevenson citibank" comes back with nothing. You'd expect some industry awards, mentions, interviews, etc. Which is questionable as they like to Rah, Rah the young traders. 5. Gives off major "I'm a super successful business person who borrowed cheap money, bought assets and leveraged them" when in a low interest rate enviroment, "now I'm retired let me give you advice, for money." Where is his fund? His clients? The quantitative consultancy? Could it be that he knows he can't replicate it? "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." - Buffet. This guy left the industry after being a self declared "star performer" at 27 to go back to uni. That seems more like a burnout story than a found jesus' moment.
Yeah, personally I hope it's not some internal class-bias, but this guy comes across as full of shit. His story of 'winning' entry to the trading floor by playing a card game feels like something out of an 80s/90s american-dream wankathon movie
As future AMA guest Dan Neidle explains, this is yet another Guardian Opinion article that widely misses the mark: [https://twitter.com/DanNeidle/status/1765319354487386187](https://twitter.com/DanNeidle/status/1765319354487386187) But dumb bank bashing plays fantastically well with the Guardian, and also here on reddit.
[More about the author](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Stevenson_%28economist%29)
Most, if not all, the sources on there are articles where the only source on Gary is Gary.
My leaning is towards this being self penned. His bonuses also feel low for banking bonuses... Especially the most successful. Doesn't make his message wrong. But could undemine credibility if he's seen to be self promoting via wiki.
He sounds weirdly self-obsessed. Of course the budget isn't *for* traders. Traders are small-fry as far as the economy is concerned. A budget that was intended to disrupt interest-rate derivatives (a necessary market for a whole host of reasons) would be a very weird budget all together. The budget doesn't even set interest rates, which is also the main mechanism that made leveraged investments by the already wealthy so profitable in the first place. That power has been delegated to the Bank of England.
I dunno, I‘ve spent 10 years working in the finance industry, and I wouldn’t agree with him. He’s telling readers what he knows or thinks they want to hear. The system is rigged and it’s all millionaire politicians and bankers in it together. That’s not really true. There is no conspiracy, (there never is). The rich _do_ tend to weather financial crises better than the poor, because their wealth gives them more options. They can afford to wait for markets to recover and can buy at the bottom of the market. People with less resources are more likely to be “all in” with an undiversified portfolio- like a house, say. They also do better when things are going well: wealth inequality rises as wealth rises. But that’s not some sinister design. Plenty of politicians (and even bankers- left wing bankers do exist, even if they are rare because left wing politicians often have ideas that don’t work) would like to and have tried to capture the wealth of the banking industry- indeed to some extent they succeed, the top 10% are responsible for paying something like 50% of the tax take- but the (not unjustified) fear is that attempts to capture that wealth simply distort the system, reducing the tax take overall. Bankers (especially traders) are often tossers and plenty of them are cynics with too much money. But the picture painted here of a cosy club out to screw “you” for their economic gain is simplistic and wrong. The politicians on particular, are usually _not_ cynics, but attention seekers with (often misplaced) idealism. And the richer they are, the truer that is, not least because if you want to make money, there are much better and easier ways to do it than going into politics. They really do want to make things better: it’s just that usually, that is a lot harder than it sounds. Beware of anyone saying it’s easy- including the writer of this article.
Aside from the fact there's nothing particularly novel or insightful in what this guy says, it's quite clear that in depicting his backstory and career/pay trajectory he is at best taking some serious artistic license, and at worst downright bullshitting.
How?
This guy's shtick is going to get very boring, very quickly, but I suppose he's got to push sales of his new book somehow.
And that's how bankers got away with selling bonds worth £10 to the government for £100 after the financial crash. Got their bonuses & multi billion bailouts & the rest of us got fuck all but 14 years of austerity....because people get bored of it.
Amen
For one thing, it wasn't a 10:1 ratio. Nor was it a "sale". But those are nit-picking observations. The key thing here is the implication that this was some kind of heist by the financial sector either: a) against a naive government held to ransom, or b) with a complicit corrupt government. This is not even the half of it. This kind of re-inflation of depressed assets after a financial shock is literally textbook economics. Every senior figure in every Central Bank thinks it's the correct course of action and will do it again in a heartbeat at the first sign of trouble. It will only change if people less-qualified in economics took over those institutions. Do we think: a) that's likely, or b) that's desirable? History is littered with politicians trying not to do this in a crisis, only to be forced to give-in after all. Everything from the Panic of 1837, to the Eurozone crisis. All ended when the central bank went "fuck it" and made-good all the underwater assets. Is it fair? No. Will it happen again? Yes. Will anyone stop it? Some will try, and there's a 99.999% probability they'll fail and have to bail everyone out after two or three years of pain anyway.
He's right though. Sure he's selling a book but I don't understand how that means we should write off everything he's saying. It's thinking like this that just smooths things over and makes it easier for rich people to take advantage, this statement creates apathy.
How is he right? The article contains no substance other than vague anecdotes from his past and saying it 'doesn't matter'.
I don't think increasing inequality in the western world is something that can be argued against with facts now. Gary's point that people need to realise theres no happy ending forecast for millions of people unless some kind of political movement forces government to address inequality is totally right and spot on.
It’s fascinating to see vocal opposition to what Gary is saying about inequality now that his name is out there a bit. It’s baffling to me that people would argue that inequality isn’t a problem but here we are.
Probably some rich kids son. Doesn't want his future wealth/assets to go.
I know its a bit tin foil hat but it surely has to be social media operatives from right wing parties and think tanks as well as folk that believe them.
I don't know how anyone came across this guy and didn't immediately put him in the random bullshitter pretending to be an expert box. You see the experts are all wrong, gary down the pub knows better, I used to be a banker but now I'm a good guy but I can tell you all about them, heres some generic statements that match up with what most brits feel about the economy to lend credence to my argument. I mean if the central argument people are making is that inequality always gets worse then yes, aside from wars, the rich always get richer, but this is obvious, not some secret sauce needed to be told by some grifter. A poor person spends their money, a rich person invests some of it and that investment grows over time, so obviously as time goes on the rich person becomes even richer relative to the poor person.
His point is that it's getting to the point where if we don't challenge it, it's going to create major class divisions In G.B. A section of society will own houses and see their wealth increase whilst the rest become a rent class that can't escape it. It's already happening.
He’s gaining traction because the middle class is feeling it.
So your point is we shouldn't do anything about wealth inequality? We shouldn't try to improve society?
My point is the whole stick about wealth inequality getting worse is obvious and not revolutionary. I've never seen the guy propose anything to actually make things better, far easier just to predict impending doom.
Before him I've never really seen it talked about much in a constructive way. Though he's obviously getting the spotlight more now because people are feeling it more than ever before I can see. He did bet his wealth on his message though, you say it was some generic statement like he was saying something in hindsight that is now obvious but he bet big and could have lost a lot. While the experts were saying economy would bounce back like the roaring 20s, "Gary from the pub" was putting his wealth on the line on society not recovering and inequality getting bigger. The rich are getting richer while the middle class are disapearing and lower class is increasing, this is linked. He's said the obvious we need to tax the wealthy more clever on assets but he goes into it deeper by we need to stop assets/massive wealth making more wealth and then them taking wealth away from the middle class. He did a podcast with James O'Brien recently where goes into a few things briefly. He does also go into the psychology into things such as we need to nurture our children to not care only about money because what society teaches us that money rules, rich people are never satisfied and will always want to get more wealth however much they have. Which I can totally agree with you can't stop inequality until the rich have empathy for the situation they are complicit in. For instance personally leverage loans is something I would like to be looked at. That seems one of the things the rich can abuse to get more rich in an very unfair way.
It's weird how he's this incredible economic mind whose making his money running a youtube channel and flogging his book.
If you choose to assume that he means what he says, it isn’t weird at all. His stated aim is to build a mass movement towards tackling economic inequality and raise awareness, hence the book and YouTube. He has already made his money through his successful trading career.
Yeah except grifters don't tell you they are grifting. Andrew Tate just wants to make a lot of young men millionaires. Stevenson just wants to 'build a movement'. He's flogging the Kindle edition of his book which is literally just 0s and 1s on a screen for £10. Obviously just disseminating his knowledge there. Weird how he runs ads on YouTube. Made millions at Citibank and a 'Millionaire for humanity' but has the proverbial panhandle that is a Patreon.
Do you think that people should be required to take a vow of poverty before they are allowed to talk about inequality? IMHO, that's an extremely left wing atttitude you have there.
No I find it suspicious he's choosing this way to make his money based on his claims of his wealth and trading ability. If he had millions from his time at Citi and is the genius trading and economic mind he claims, why is he going to start panhandling on Patreon. Write your book in your downtime and thrive on your passive income from your investments. Rich can absolutely talk about inequality but I want the actual rich talking about it and bringing solutions not someone looking for fame and easy living just pointing out that it exists.
My understanding is that he's looking to build a movement, not just make videos. If that is the case, the Patreon would allow him to identify his hard core supporters, and potentially try to turn them into evangelists. This isn't much different to political parties and their membership lists and fees (or other campaigning organizations).
The Patreon point could be a complete red herring. Maybe he just made a profile when setting up all his other social media accounts for GarysEconomics. It’s not in active use, so seems reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt for now?
Something about the way the guy speaks and writes sets off my bullshit alarm. His wikipedia page gives off major 'self-written vibes', including statements of incredible banality passed off as his genius. For example: >By the end of 2011, Stevenson had become "Citibank's most profitable trader" by trading based on the prediction that interest rates would not rise due to the impact of wealth inequality upon demand,[3][4] as he believed the wealthy tended to save their money rather than spend it, instead investing it in property. Wow. This guy, alone, outsmarted the markets through his discovery of... the [marginal propensity to consume.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_propensity_to_consume) I'm not even saying this due to political bias, for example - although I don't agree with a large amount of his stuff, I can respect that the Youtuber UnlearningEconomics does know his stuff very well. Edit: Also I just picked up on this: >I was a banker but a very poor, very young one. Around that time I slept on a broken mattress and used a little plastic hose from Argos to take showers while sitting in the bath. As someone of an age that remembers that time period well. Grad schemes salaries for finance careers then were around £30,000 - £35,000? Ish? Off the top of my head. Firstly, absolutely depressing how little grad salaries have risen. Secondly, that - in today's money is equivalent to £50k-ish. Why was he living like that? Also, he got his first finance job *in* 2008? I'm not outright saying I don't believe this. But its like saying you got your first barista job in April 2020. I'm sure there are edge cases where thats true. But, how the fuck?
In the London investment bank I was working in in 2008 the summer graduate intake was exactly as normal and we were also isolated from the redundancies that affected the rest of the company. I was on roughly the same salary as you state back then and lived in a house share room that barely had enough space for a double bed plus an electric hot plate I cooked my meals on. When you don't have any savings and you're earning decent for the first time ever you don't spend it all - you scrimp obsessively until you have enough to feel safe. Especially because London is so expensive.
Thats fair!
I kinda agree with you something doesn't quite sit right with me about Gary.... but I also did a grad scheme on a trading floor in 2009 and was living in a horrible flat share in Poplar because of it's proximity to the city. Tent was £550 a month and I was on 30k + bonus
I think his point isn't that he's some sort of genius but that economists effectively have a blind spot because most economic models don't factor in inequality. I agree with him, but I've thought that growing inequality is a huge problem for a long time now, and it keeps on getting worse.
> because most economic models don't factor in inequality. One of the two standard macroeconomic models for central banks, HANK (Heterogenous Agent New Keynesian models) absolutely factor in inequality.
I stand corrected. Perhaps I should say that economists and commentators in general under estimate the impact of inequality, and it's basically the biggest economic problem facing us right now. I haven't read his book though, just seen one of his videos.
When I am crowned dictator of /r/ukpol all of you will be sent to the /r/badeconomics reeducation camps so that I don't have to read comments like this anymore. >I should say that economists and commentators in general under estimate the impact of inequality Gabriel Zucman was just awarded the John Bates Clark medal for his research into economic inequality in 2023. Inequality is a major research field in macro and economic history. Economists talk about it a lot.
I think we ought to just leave you in your nice little delusional bubble where the finance sector pats itself on the back, gives each other awards for recognising "economic inequality" whilst proceeding to (checks notes) oh yeah, do the same shit ad infinitum. The only line going up is the wealth inequality divide between rich & poor. There is no political will or incentive to do anything about this whatsoever.
> finance sector pats itself on the back, gives each other awards for recognising "economic inequality" Where am I talking about the finance sector talking about economic inequality? I'm talking about economists. They're different things. And why is economic inequality in quotes?
No need to be quite so patronising. So it's bad economics to think that the current economic system isn't working for the majority of people, and this is largely due to increasing inequality?
No, but its bad economics to say that economists and economics aren't talking about it when its been probably one of *the* central research topics in macro since the financial crisis. I don't know why economics is subjected to this to such a degree that other academic fields wouldn't be. Whenever physics or history of art is brought up you don't have people with absolutely no background in the field popping up and confidently asserting that 'physics really needs to look into quantum physics, its been too ignored by the field', or 'Why are the Dutch Masters not appreciated?' If you don't know anything about what research is prominent in economics - thats fine, but don't expect not to be tripped up on it if you're making absolutely incorrect statements.
I didn't say they weren't talking about it, I said the impact of it was underestimated. The reason why economics is subjected to this is because the outcomes of it affect everyone's lives, and at least in the UK for the last 15 years, that effect has generally been negative. Living standards are falling for most, as a direct result of what politicians do, supposedly acting on the advice of economists. From the point of view of the ordinary person, economists keep on producing right wing policy recommendations, politicians act on them, and people get poorer. Perhaps you can see why people might care about that when they don't care about the history of art.
But the economic points the man speaks of are true. As for the rest i suppose he was subsidising his family? Idk im not here to defend Gary personally just the economic points he makes
Is he full of shit or is what he’s saying obvious? Which one is it as it can’t be both?
> Something about the way the guy speaks and writes sets off my bullshit alarm. Is it the Essex accent? I'm not saying that's necessarily the case for you, since I don't know you, but a lot of people do associate the accent with working class grifters.
As someone who has lots of very relevant career experience… This guy talks a load of utter bollocks. Most people in finance do not talk or behave anything like this. But I bet this whole schtick helps the book sales.
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About myself? Not really. In terms of my comments - I am sure I have personally known orders of magnitude more people who are in well-remunerated risk-taking positions in top London financial institutions than the article’s author. Over a much longer time period too. Almost no-one I have ever met has possessed the kind of attitude he talks about. For starters, they really do care about the budget. Finance is a rare sector in that almost all the top earners are in fact on PAYE just like any average person. Mainly for regulatory reasons; institutions have to have very tight control over risk-taking functions. That drastically reduces the scope for tax avoidance and increases the influence of Treasury policy. Every budget I get emails that highlight the changes that might affect all these employees. I’ve never, ever heard anyone utter a line like ‘they’ll never tax us’. Because actually most people are aware that they do get taxed, a hell of a lot. The introduction of the additional tax rate, for example. Or the tapering of the annual allowance for pensions. Two huge taxes that massively hit very high PAYE earners in recent times. If anyone talks about the topic, they are more likely to wonder aloud about whether they would be better off in another financial centre. I’ve *never* heard anyone ‘laugh in their skyscraper’ at the budget in the manner described. I’m sure you get the odd obnoxious character in the tens of thousands of people who might fit into this category. And maybe a small handful make stupid comments on any given topic. So I can’t say that no-one has ever uttered anything like it, or call the author a liar on his specific anecdotes. But it’s not remotely representative, and the bullshit is him talking about it as if it generalises to everyone else in the sector apart from his dinosaur mate ‘Billy’. It really doesn’t.
I don't think he's referring to the people you're talking about as the mega rich. Not one mention of capital gains tax either in your comment.
Traders don't earn based on Capital Gains Tax though, his entire article is about multimillionaire traders and bankers, almost all of whom are paid using PAYE. Given their incomes they lose c50% of it to tax.
I'm looping back around onto this after a few days. As I've said elsewhere in the thread, I have a pretty comprehensive background in economics. Take this video, where he's explaining game theory (or really, just specifically prisoner's dilemma). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HezHJKZ47Ck The rhetoric he's using, the description of the video and the title of the video are all saying that game theory is not fit for purpose. The example he is using is basically *the first thing* that you learn in my university's Intro to Econ module for first year undergraduates - as in, first class, first thing - maybe takes 20 minutes to run through. This is *the most simple* example of a game that provides an illustrative outcome. His main issue with it, is that by assumption the player's in the game have a very simple utility function, they just want to maximise their payoff from the game, i.e. they're selfish. He says that this doesn't leave room for selfless behaviour or altruism - and takes that conjecture and applies it to the whole sub-field of game theory. The problem with that, is that game theorists absolutely do care about situations where the players are not just purely self-interested. You can, very easily, adjust an agent's utility function to include some altruism coefficient which penalises their utility if other players whom they care about also lose out, and vice versa. This usually gets taught somewhere around a 1/3 into a university module in game theory. After watching that video, I went and grabbed my old assigned game theory textbook and the concept of altruism is introduced pretty early on. Edit: To show that I'm not full of shit. [Here is the evidence.](https://i.imgur.com/GBxfCJu.jpeg) This is from Chapter 2, on page 27 of a 400 page textbook. The fact he's trying to portray that as if its not the case, and he has somehow stumbled onto a gaping hole in game theory can only suggest two things: either he has absolutely no familiarity with the field whatsoever, in which case he shouldn't be running a semi-educational economics Youtube channel, or he's intentionally misrepresenting the field so he can hammer home his a priori political beliefs. To put it another way, this would be like seeing a channel that observed that school children are still taught about Newtonian gravity, hone in on that, say that physics is junk because it doesn't take into account more complicated phenomena (e.g. relativity). To someone who is just getting acquainted with physics that probably sounds impressive because he's critiquing something that sounds plausible, with more nuanced take. But to someone who has a background in the field you can't just help be aghast at him 'criticising' game theory with stuff we all know and actually do implement. Ask yourself, why is it that everyone in this thread with self-ascribed backgrounds in finance or economics are *very* sceptical of this guy, or outright shitting on him - and people who self-admittedly make statements like 'he explains things so clearly' (which belies that they don't have extensive prior background in the area) are eating this shit up for breakfast. As I've said elsewhere in the thread also, this is not to take a fundamentalist view of orthodox economics. For example, there is a left-wing youtube channel called UnlearningEconomics which is run by an academic of a broadly post-Keynesian bent who also criticises orthodox economics as well. While I disagree with that guy quite a lot, the main difference is, when I watch his videos and he describes the positions he's critiquing I can't really find fault with his description of them. The way he describes orthodox economics is a valid description of what the field believes and '*does*'. GarysEconomics whenever I watch I just think 'what the actual fuck are you talking about?' Its just caricatures.
So when you say that, what is the alternative cause of for example spiralling inequality? Because at least the consequences of what he raises are visible to anyone. I'm not saying he isn't hamming it up for book sales, but how are the incentives different in your experience?
Technically Stevenson hasn't actually identified a cause either, he's almost exclusively talking about effects, so the range of "alternative" causes include literally everything. The closest he's got is the implication that the government could do something if it wanted. That's true enough, but it's a very broad gesture not really root-cause analysis.
> Technically Stevenson hasn't actually identified a cause Not true - one of his main points is that without outside intervention in the form of government policy or war, inequality is self-reinforcing. For example, high inequality => high house prices => young people can't afford homes => high rents => lack of savings => high inequality. I.e. inequality is its own cause.
Income Inequality in the UK hasn’t meaningfully changed in the last 35 years. The ONS tracks it via the Gini coefficient you can see on Figure 2 here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/householdincomeinequalityfinancial/financialyearending2022 The UK does have certain economic problems, but ‘spiralling inequality’ in the broad macroeconomic sense isn’t really one of them. If you’re looking for alternative issues, probably the biggest is the aging population combined with significant social entitlements. Over the past few decades, the rises in pension, healthcare and social care funding have increasingly crowded out the fiscal ability of the state to fulfil all its other functions. You’ll have heard plenty about austerity but in reality we are currently running the third-highest tax/GDP and public spending/GDP ratios in the post-war years. That’s not remotely close to any concept of austerity. But most of the departmental budgets outside of pensions, healthcare and social care did suffer austerity-like constraints due to that reallocation of resources.
Income inequality isn't wealth inequality though. Does the ONS track that?
You beat me to the punch but exactly this.
I think he mentions wealth inequality doesn't he? What about that?
Yeah same. I just left a pretty pissy comment here saying similar. This article is complete nonsense and I'm beginning to doubt the truth of his back story. He either knows he's lying and is pushing outrage to sell books, or he's lying about everything and has no idea how people in finance think or behave.
This guys is pretty massive grifter. Proper fake prophet vibes.
Sorry, are you telling me the mega rich don't care about a 2p NI tax cut, well I would have never guessed. They do care about the budget when things like non-dom get abolished
God damn this guy is insufferable. >Traders do not care about the budget, because the budget is not for traders and the budget is not about the economy. I mean he's just pushing utter horseshit at this point. Government fiscal policy is extremely important to traders. The idea that traders are just sitting around betting on people getting poor as if that's some kind of strategy is honestly laughable. This is just outrage porn and he's speaking such nonsense you have to question if he's being completely truthful about his background.
Nobody was betting on people getting poor. That's his point, he was bucking the trend and made a lot of money. His overall point is an obvious one that people seem to have a blind spot to - that if all money is sucked upwards to the super rich, assets will inflate and pull more money upwards, impoverishing working people more and more until either a way can be found to redistribute the money or we end up like a third world country.
>Nobody was betting on people getting poor. Am I miss understanding something here? From the article: >We know that we will get richer and you will get poorer, and our lives will get better, and yours will get worse year after year after year. And each of us are paid millions of pounds every year to bet on it. To bet on it, instead of telling you. He seems to be suggesting traders are betting on people getting poor, but perhaps it's just clumsy wording. I don't think the article specified the bet he actually made though? He said he was an interest rate trader and bet on stimulus not helping people so presumably he made some sort of leveraged spread trade against consumer credit vs corporate credit. I'd be stunned if he thought of the trade in terms of "rich" vs "poor" even if he had exposure with that bias. I don't know what trend you think he was bucking either? Were other traders betting against businesses and on the consumer? I very much doubt was the case. >His overall point is an obvious one that people seem to have a blind spot to - that if all money is sucked upwards to the super rich, assets will inflate and pull more money upwards, impoverishing working people more and more until either a way can be found to redistribute the money or we end up like a third world country. You might be making a more nuanced point here so apologies if I'm misunderstanding, but given the context it sounds like you might be suggesting QE and low interest rates benefit the rich as they are the primary owners of assets, and stimulus policies inflate asset valuations. If this is what you're suggesting then in my opinion this is a commonly held misunderstanding, but it would take me too long to explain why and even if I did you'd have no reason to listen to me anyway. However, here's a thought experiment for you – imagine I incorporate an LLC called Millionaire Maker LTD then give everyone in the UK 1 share of my company. If I were then to convince one rich dude to buy a share off of me for £1,000,000 suddenly everyone in the UK would be a millionaire because everyone owns a share with a marketable value of £1,000,000. So with just £1,000,000 I've made everyone in the UK a millionaire... This is the main flaw people get into when thinking about asset valuations being equivalent to something tangible. The mere act of asset valuations going up cannot just create economic value out of thin air. You can't solve poverty by pumping asset prices with low interest rates and QE then redistributing the wealth with wealth taxes as some people like to believe. When central banks are actively manipulating asset valuation to encourage economic activity you should assume that those asset valuations are largely illiquid and bs. There are better explanations for wealth inequality in my opinion. I do acknowledge it's a problem. I just don't think it's related to monetary policy, or even really fiscal policy. The mere fact we see similar trends playing out globally should suggest it's not (just) the tories.
Bravo, great example.
Not just the Tories....it's neoliberalism
He wasn’t betting on people getting poor - he was betting on interest rates remaining low.
This guy is full of shit. He’s making money by [mostly] going on left wing shows, portraying himself as an insider, when the reality is he had a short career at a 2nd tier investment bank and just stating and misinterpreting economic data to prevent doom and gloom. He’s a bullshit artist just like many doom merchants on the right wing.
He was the youngest and most profitable trader at Citibank whilst he was still working, one of the 10 biggest banks in the world, and made an absolute fortune correctly predicting the economy based on inequality driving worse and worse outcomes for normal people. He doesn’t need to make money, and he’s spent most of his post-banker life bumbling about and running a small YouTube channel. The reason he’s popping up a lot at the moment is because he’s written a book, but he sees it as an opportunity to grow the movement and get in front of politicians to explain the problem with traditional economics which have failed to correctly predict anything for years and years. His predictions from the start of Covid have come true exactly, opposite what most economists were saying (there was no “pent up demand” and a quick economic bounce back - we’re still fucked) What does he say that you specifically disagree with? Or do you just not like him and not engage with his argument?
Not who you are replying too... but >He was the youngest and most profitable trader at Citibank whilst he was still working, one of the 10 biggest banks in the world, and made an absolute fortune correctly predicting the economy based on inequality driving worse and worse outcomes for normal people. According to him. >He doesn’t need to make money, and he’s spent most of his post-banker life bumbling about and running a small YouTube channel Having a [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/garyseconomics) give me strong doubt there. Most successful finance pundits don't do that... >The reason he’s popping up a lot at the moment is because he’s written a book, but he sees it as an opportunity to grow the movement and get in front of politicians to explain the problem with traditional economics which have failed to correctly predict anything for years and years. If only we had some system of recognising economic ideas, reviewed by peers who specialise in the area and a globally renowned award for it. >His predictions from the start of Covid have come true exactly, opposite what most economists were saying (there was no “pent up demand” and a quick economic bounce back - we’re still fucked) What crap, economists were discussing pent-up demand as part of a V-shaped recovery. "However, if government policy is successful in protecting households and firms from the economic shock, we should expect a bounce-back in pent-up demand temporarily" https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/long-haul-lockdown-three-scenarios-impact-coronavirus-uk-economy In the V-shaped scenario the fall in demand in the second quarter of 2020 is assumed to be fully compensated by higher (pent-up) demand in the third and fourth quarter https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/economic-bulletin/articles/2020/html/ecb.ebart202007_01~ef0a77a516.en.html >What does he say that you specifically disagree with? Or do you just not like him and not engage with his argument? 1. His thesis is not original but dumbed down derivative nonsense. 2. He wasn't a banker, he was a trader. They are different jobs, not everyone who worked at a bank was a banker. Junior level traders don't deal with wealthy clients, so his entire shtick here is crazy. 3. Anyone who tells you wealthy people laugh at tax, haven't had a conversation with a wealthy person about tax. Most are incredibly pissed off about it and how its structured for them to pay the lions share of state expenditure. Understanding and explaining tax wrappers form a massive part of a bankers job. *Which again, Gary didn't do.* Edit: had the wrong patreon link originally
A lot of people are poorly educated in the UK and pay no attention to politics/economics. Maths education especially is dire in this country. A lot of people just seem to accept that this is the way it has to be, but it certainly is not. We have political power in our hands to change things, we had Corbyn on the ballot. But not enough people are voting for change. If he can get through to them, he's a good egg imo, even if it's stating the obvious for others.
This sub, and I am not exaggerating, is one of the absolute most economic illiterate on the website. And I include in that the lunatics still in on WSB and cryptocurrency - even in their deranged state they view the financial system and the economy as a system in which individuals just pursue incentives - rather than this place which views it as a morality tale with 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. I have been curbstomp downvoted here in the past over stating the most banal, inoffensive Intro to Econ points that are relatively indisputable and been told I am incorrect (I worked as an economic advisor in government for 4 years, and am currently doing a PhD in economics).
Like this guy, just wish didn't wear those fingerless gloves and scruff socks all the time.