Another round: Economist spells out why stopping immigration won't save the economy

Am I tough enough? Strong and stable leadership. Hell yes, I'm tough enough. Shut the fridge. Not another one. It's the Molotov Show. F*** cast. Gary Stevenson, hello. Welcome back. Glad to have you back on Politics Show. Glad to be back. You were obviously here last time round for the hardback of your book The Trading Game. The paperback is here now. Delightful cover, delightful content. For people that might not have seen the last interview, people who might not be familiar with your YouTube channel, tell us who you are and what you do.

So my name's Gary Stevenson around YouTube, Instagram, TikTok called Gary's Economics. It's explaining what's happening in our economic situation in the real world in an accessible way. My background is I studied mass and economics and I was a trader for Citibank from 2008 until 2014. I made a lot of money by being that

the economy would never recover from 2008 crisis because of growing inequality. In 2011, I was City Bank's most profitable trader in the world. Quick down 2014, I've basically spent the last 10 years trying to explain to people if you don't deal with rapidly growing inequality of wealth,

your living standards will get worse and worse and worse and you'll see more and more and more poverty in your country, which I think is becoming increasingly obviously true.

The channel is getting really popular. The book was a number one last year. Congratulations. Yeah. People are interested because they can see what's happening in the economy, basically. And I'm just trying to make it really, really clear to people. That's because of growing inequality. It's not separate to growing inequality. And yeah, the book is about telling that story. The YouTube is about telling that story. And yeah, I just want to get people aware that if we don't deal with this inequality, it gets worse.

I guess we were just talking about it now before we started rolling and in the time since we last spoke to you, there's been an election, well, two very important elections, particularly for British viewers, obviously the UK election and then we saw Trump getting inaugurated this week. To stay with the UK just specifically for a second, I think a lot of people who care about wealth inequality and sort of saw a change of government and a new political party coming in after 14 years of a right-wing government were kind of expecting

Maybe not immediately the economic situation to improve, but certainly, you know, a more, well I won't say left wing, but we'll say a more socially progressive political party controlling government and therefore hoping that something would be done to address

wealth inequality and therefore an improving economic situation in this country, which isn't necessarily actually how it's gone since they got in. So I would just kind of, to start with, invite yours, like opening remarks, I guess, about the new Labour government, about Rachael Reeves' Chancellor and how you think, particularly with that budget.

That's impact to the economic situation we find ourselves in now. Yeah, so I don't just do a YouTube, right? Behind the scenes, I do try my best to talk to politicians and you do get a sense of who's interested and who's not. We never, ever really had anyone show any sign of interest from the Conservative Party. So I was never surprised that they

oversaw massive increase in wealth inequality. But obviously, a lot of people might expect that layer bar being, you know, the left wing of the main political parties would be more open to taking action on inequality, to shifting the taxation system more towards very rich people. But basically, we, because it's not just me who campaigns on these things, we saw very, very, very little appetite for them to do anything about that.

You know, going into the election, the year before the election, two years before the election. When kiss on the first came in before he did his reshuffle, there was a little bit of interest, but then there was a reshuffle just after he came in. Since then, I've never been contacted by any, any front venture being never to this day. And the people I know who are more involved in lobbying, they just want no interest. So for me,

You know, I put up videos before the election, just saying. It was very clear they were going to win before, like, decently, a long time before the election, basically, since the sort of trust budget. It was clear they were going to win. But it was clear to me that they weren't going to do anything on inequality. And, you know, I say that I still hope that one day they might have a change of heart, but it was clear to me that they weren't going to do anything on inequality.

If you're me and if you have disbelief that I have, that the reason the economy is getting worse is because inequality has got worse. You have the additional context that wealth inequality increased massively during COVID. When you see this incoming government, that looks very unlikely to take any actual inequality.

you have to accept that probably the economy is not going to improve. And of course, you know, I'm sure if you had someone from Labour here, they'd say, you know, it's only been six months, nine months, give it time. I'm very, very pessimistic on their ability to significantly improve the economic situation. And that's what I've been saying for a long time. So.

Yeah, my concern is that people will lose faith in labour and, you know, having lost faith in the Conservatives if they didn't lose faith in labour. And I think I said this last time I came on. If you see a loss of faith in both the traditional parties of the centre, then people are going to look for different options. And this is why you're seeing, you know,

massive growth and support for a form. But, you know, if you look beyond the borders of the UK, exact same thing is happening in basically every country in Europe, the US, you know, people are losing faith in these centuries political parties. And the obvious people who are up next is, yeah, anti-immigrant parties like Farage, like Trump. Yeah. We'll come to that, I think.

There's two things, well, a lot of your answers I want to get to will come to trust and the mini budget and the sort of the response of the bond markets and particularly in the context of Reeves in a second. But let's just do, let's say that Labour person was sat in this room with us now. Yeah, okay, we've had six months with nine months, we need more time, but crucially, I guess their argument would go.

Our whole pitch is we need to grow the economy. And if we grow the economy, that will then give us the bandwidth, the scope, the latitude to be able to then address the inequalities in our political and economic system, whether that's wealth inequality, whether that's social justice, whatever it is, that their pitch has essentially been, we have to grow the economy first before we can look to do any of the things that we might have political motivations to do. I guess the question to you is, do you buy that argument?

But how? When was the last time a politician came into government with any economic policy other than our priorities to grow the economy? When was the last time? When? 50 years, that's all that's been said. We're going to grow the economy.

absolute consistent governance which insists our priority is growth. What is growth in this country? 1%. 1%. And I think that there's this, listen, I studied economics. I know people look at me and think this guy's not an economist, right? I've got one degree from Land School of Economics, the one from Oxford. I've studied this stuff. I know the theory, all right? You can't just keep saying growth. It's not like Om, like a mantra. You just say it and you achieve your mind. I think this point. Listen, I'm not part of the anti-growth coalition. Economic growth is great.

If you keep doing the same thing again and again, and it consistently hasn't worked, why do you expect it to change now? And look, I hope it does work. And you can see that they have changed economic policy a little, modestly. They want to spend a little bit more. They want to tax a little bit more. They want to borrow a little bit more. They want to invest a little bit more. And I don't think any of these things are necessarily bad ideas in and of themselves. But it's more of the same. What they did is what Biden did, but way less aggressive.

And what happened to Biden? I just think what I see as somebody who spent five years in elite university departments and has now spent 10 years floating around think tanks and politicians and journalists is a bunch of posh boys who keep thinking if they smash the numbers together and shout growth enough, it will happen.

And it's just working. I think we need to step back and ask ourselves, why is it continually failing to deliver? And we need to start thinking about what is it we're missing? Because nobody ever talks about distribution. What you had during COVID. Do you know what the total amount of the total government deficit now is since the beginning of COVID? Total amount of money given up by the government since the beginning of COVID.

What total the debt pile is like? Total increase in debt. So total deficit, like 700 billion. It's now £1 trillion, £1 trillion, given that it's the beginning of Covid. And now the government is in a situation, I'm sure we'll talk about this, where suddenly the light will actually be kind of all suspended anymore. Well, who's got that £1 trillion you gave out? Who's got that now? This is total lack of awareness of wealth and distribution of resources.

You give out a trillion pounds and then suddenly you're like, oh, we don't have any money left. There's not even the question of who has that one trillion pounds. There's an absurd naivety, an absurd lack of focus on distribution and resources. And I know that this is kind of the status quo in university departments and probably in white hole, probably behind the scenes, house of commons. You need to open up your eyes and realize this is not working, understand why it's not working and start looking at different ideas.

I'll keep playing. Well, I'm not necessarily devil's advocate because I don't think the arguments are very strong, but I'll the counterpoint. Okay. So you got right. Yeah. I accept there's been this sort of gaping increase in wealth inequality, but Gary, what you're suggesting, I, you know, redistributive taxation, I to address these inequalities.

it won't work, we'll get capital flight and the problem with the underlying weakness I guess in our economy is anemic gains in productivity growth and if we take that approach you won't see an increase in productivity and what little capital we do have remaining in the country it's gonna fly elsewhere so we can't we can't pursue that sort of policy program. The first thing I would say is I'm not advocating for redistributive taxation.

I'm advocating to stop the redistributed taxation. What is happening now is a massive, massive increase in wealth inequality. Ordinary families are no longer being able to own their own home. They're massively in debt. The government's lost its assets. It's massively in debt. So a massive loss in wealth holding by ordinary families and by the government. Where's that wealth gone? It's held by the super rich. The redistribution has happened. It is happening. I'm trying to stop the redistribution. I am campaigning against redistribution because the redistribution is happening as we speak.

The second part of the argument, if you tax them, they'll leave. I think this depends on

A lack of understanding of what I mean and what wealth is basically because obviously an ordinary person for them what matters is their job and their main source of money is their job and they work and they make money, that's how you get an income. If you're a Rishi Sunak and your net wealth is 700 million pounds, your wealth doesn't come from your job, your income doesn't come from your job, your income comes from your assets. So if I were to tax you, if I were to tax you, if I were going to massively raise your tax,

You could probably shoot this from Dubai. You could probably do that. You could release it here and it would be fine. But if what you own is 700 million pounds of British assets, you go to Dubai, well where's your money come from? If you're only British houses, British property, British businesses, British government there, British mortgages,

Well, your money is coming from British people when they pay their mortgage, when they pay their rent, right? So these guys who own, I'm not talking about tax, I've never, I've never once said I want to raise tax and working people. I want to raise tax on the orders of wealth, okay? And if these guys leave, they live in the Cayman Islands now. Let me ask you a question. If I bought one billion pounds of Chinese assets and when they turn around to me into the year and say, where's your tax going? I say, I'm sorry, I live in the Cayman Islands. Do you think they'd accept that?

No. No, they don't. So why do we accept it? Why do we accept it? Why do we? Why do we, a country who has just seen a prime minister worth 700 million pounds, whose father-in-law is one of the richest people in the world, previously saw a prime minister leave office and immediately make 10 million pounds working for a financial company, why do we accept a situation which basically makes tax paying voluntary for the people who own the fucking country?

I'm not talking about I've never once attacked working people. These guys own your house. These guys own your mortgage. These guys own the government debt. These guys own the hospitals that you need to go to when you're sick. These guys own the land that makes the food, right?

The question is, do you want your country, the physical wealth of your country, to be owned by people who pay tax in your country? And if your answer is no, then what you will get is bankruptcy. And that is what you're seeing. It's absurd, it's absurd. China doesn't allow it. Why the hell do we allow it?

You're almost, you're driving to a deeper question, right? Which is like, what is the purpose of our political system? What is the purpose of the economy, right? Is it to provide a decent standard of living to the people that inhabit the country? And yeah, okay, it's nice if we have economic growth or it's nice if, you know, that we don't have a deficit, obviously.

The counterarguments you often get will be like, well, what happens to productivity or what happens to growth? It's like, yeah, those numbers, they are important. They are indicators of the health and economy. But at the end of the day, if the majority of the population are slipping closer and closer towards a state of poverty,

The typical economic indicators and things that we're told to care about become less relevant because it's this deeper question of like for whom does the economy function? Yeah, I always remember this one moment in the Brexit debates. I can't remember. I don't think it was George Osborne. It might have been George Osborne. A conservative politician was on question time and he said, if we leave the EU, GDP will drop by 6.7%.

And some women stood up in the audience, that's your GDP. And she got kind of a model, but I love it because it's true, right? What is GDP now compared to 50 years ago? What is GDP now compared to 50 years? It was massively, massively, massively higher. But my dad didn't go to university, worked in a post office for 40 years. Never once, and even probably median wage in this country, was able to buy a house, support families, retire now. It's never been rich, but he's got a comfortable retirement. He owns the property that he lives in. And now you've got

families with two parents with advanced degrees, kind of thought to own property. So, listen, economic growth is great, it's fantastic, increasing your productivity is great, it's fantastic.

What does it matter if people can't afford financial security in homes? And I think an important message that I want to send the people watching this is from me, somebody who comes from a poor background, has been to elite universities, has been involved in the discussion about economics in the media, in politics. The people I have in these discussions are almost all of them from relatively rich families and financially comfortable.

And for them, it's fine. For them, it's fine. And for them, it works. So when they say economic growth, economic growth, economic growth, productivity, productivity, productivity, I want you to remember for all of these people in the conversation, the vast majority of the economists, the politicians, the journalists, it is working for them. They get richer year after year, generation after generation. They have nice big houses with nice big gardens and they are secure. So when they say, don't worry, we'll be a little bit of economic growth. I want you to ask them for who?

for who? Because what I see, coming from a poor background, is there's nobody like me in that conversation. I'm from East London, right? It's not just me, I don't hear any Manchester accents, I don't hear any Birmingham accents, I don't hear any Belfast accents, you know what I mean? If you're lucky, you might find a really posh Scottish guy in there once every 10 years, you know what I mean? The ordinary people are not being represented, and I always remember there was one time

When we were in Russell Brown wanted to get to politics. And he went on news night. And he spoke to Evan Davis, PPE Oxford, okay. And he was saying, living down as a falling, he was talking at the time about these E15 mums, mums in Stratford getting forced out of the places where they grew up. And he was saying, living down as a falling. And Evan Davis, Oxford PPE, same degree as Boris, same degree as David Cameron, I think. Turn around and showed him a 150 year graph

of GDP per capita and said, no, look, it's fine. It's fine. Because it's fine for him. It's fine for him. I was at 2017, 2019, I was at Oxford. And the course was just two years of inverting fucking matrices, right? That's all it was, maths, maths, algebra, algebra, algebra. In the mid-year review, they said, what do you think of the course? I said, I think it's shit. And they said, what's wrong with it? You're not talking about the housing crisis. You're not talking about why people can't get jobs. And these guys,

We're sitting in a castle, we're in capes by the way, that's what we have to wear, bow ties. They turn around to each other, they couldn't believe it and the guy in the middle said to, what do you mean? The economy is getting better. Because for them it is getting better, for them it is getting better. So don't allow these guys to throw their graphs and to throw their numbers at you while they get richer every year and while you can't afford to turn your fucking heating on. You know, that's the whole reason.

My channel is about educating the public, but also making them feel like they are allowed, like they have a right to have an opinion about the economy. And if you kind of ought to buy a house, and if you kind of ought to have a family, and if in increasingly common extreme cases, you're struggling to feed your kids, you have a right to say, I don't care about your economic growth, we need food and housing and education.

When did we get that? When was the last time we saw a mass increase in living standards? Just after the Second World War. After the Second World War. When people had been forced to kill each other for six years. And during that time, during that time that we devoted our whole economy to killing each other back home, the government made sure that people had food and housing and health care and education. We made sure that people had food and housing and health care and education.

And these guys realised if we can develop our entire economy to killing each other and still provide our people with food and housing and healthcare and education, then we can do it when there's no one. We can still do it now. We can still do it now. And I want to empower people to demand that because we can do it. It's really interesting, isn't it? Because I guess...

It's for different drivers and different reasons, but in a quite similar way, you find yourself in a position where these basic elements of the social contract have essentially been broken, right? That time you're referring to where it's like you could have a job that's possibly even below the medium wage, and yet you could still put a roof over your family's head. You could possibly support a family with one wage and one income rather than two. You could own a home and we're moving away from that.

Instead of sort of going right we have this horrific war where what do we actually want and there's the post-war consensus and we talk about a massive increase in social housing and education and all the other sort of things that ran alongside it and instead it seems to the point you touched on earlier we have this political shift instead

towards the radical right and the new right and this I guess Taylor's oldest time maybe you know economic hardship what happens politically where you get scapegoating of minorities be they immigrants be they sort of people from different gender identities whatever it is and it seems it seems like the sort of the left the center whether that's Joe Biden whether it's Keir Starmer and the fixation on kind of these economic metrics that we've been talking about

of basically like delivery, you know, Biden says, well, we've had a record number of jobs, you know, more than a million jobs or something to the American economy. And, you know, we've got growth, the other G7 nations could only dream to have. And, you know, your man in Arkansas just turns around and says, I pay more than $10 for a box of eggs. I don't give a fuck about what GDP growth is.

It feels like the sort of the political parties that would typically respond to those arguments with something like a post-war consensus. They're almost been like castrated. They don't have the answers to the moment that we find ourselves in. And it's the radical right that actually goes, you know what?

it's an immigrant, it's a trans person or whatever, and you're sort of crying out there, but a trans person probably isn't their landlord, a trans person probably isn't domiciling their assets in a tax haven. Yeah, I'm very frustrated with the mainstream pies of the centre left, and I've been frustrated with them for a long time. I didn't start my YouTube channel until 2020, and I quit my job as a trader in 2014.

And I know now, you know, I've got a book with my fucking face on the cover and YouTube is my face and my name on the cover. But I know it's all like, it's the Gary Stevenson show. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want, you know, you've read the book, right? So I spent like a year and a half getting fucking harassed by one of the biggest corporations in the world. You know, I nearly got sued into bankruptcy, right? I didn't want to come out and be like, oh, let's start the Gary Stevenson show. I wanted to go to the fucking Philippines and drink peanut glasses, right? And I was looking, I wanted to work on this

Let's reduce wealth inequality, but I didn't want to be the guy at the front.

I looked around for fucking ages, for people doing this work, for people working on wealth inequality. And I couldn't find them. I couldn't find them. I looked in the political parties, I looked in their think tanks, I looked in academia. And the reason behind it is basically because all of that work needs funding. And rich people who are very happy to fund the work on climate change, you know, identity issues, you know, minority issues, which are all important issues. They tend not to want to fund the work that says tax rich people more, right?

There's a question of why the mainstream political parties aren't doing it. I think that comes down to, I mean, really, first of all, we shouldn't tell everyone with the same brush, right? Look, they're good people in Labour. You know, I'm sure there's some good people to conservative party. Please email me if you're one of them, because I'd love to meet you. There's good people in there. But at the end of the day, their economic policies are dominated by these economic PhD types.

And I want you to realise, right? Imagine you're me, right? You come from East London, you come from a poor family, you've got a very good degree from LSE, you're 20 years old, you're choosing what to do for a job. You could, I'm going to go work for government, I'm going to become an academic, I'm going to stop inequality.

You'll have to do a master's PhD postdoc. You'll be spending money borrowing money every year. You'll probably be 200 grand in debt by the time you're 30. You might be making 78 grand a year in your late 30s. Or you go into finance. And I was a multi-millionaire at 25. So what kind of people go into that world? And if you actually look, economics PhD is the least social class representative PhD in the whole country.

And it's obvious why, because if you're poor and you've got a very good economics degree, you'd be kind of mad to do a PhD, because you can make so much more money in the city, right? And the end result is, it drives me mad that I did this to your master at Oxford. You know, it's like 100 posh people in the building.

talking about how's the economy working while inequality is going like that which means that their lives are becoming unbelievably richer but all people are struggling to eat and they're just saying everything's fine you know it's um i think we have and we have a massive problem of class diversity and class representation in economics but also in journalism i'm sure you'll be aware of that and in politics and this is why you know before i did my youtube i was

writing articles. I wrote articles for the Guardian. And that was when I used to get contacted by some Labour MPs. And I actually got quite popular on the economics left with my early COVID stuff.

And this was during COVID, and then my mates would come to me like, Gary, this stuff you're saying, I'm fucking worried. I'm worried I'm worried about where I'd be able to have a house, where I'd be able to have a family. And that's when I realized like, while I'm talking, while I'm writing articles in the Guardian, nobody's talking to the public. Who was talking to our average guy on the street? Well, I'll tell you who's talking about the economy, it's not Jeff Raj and it's Donald Trump and it's Andrew Tate. These guys talk to the man on the street. So I shifted to YouTube because unfortunately, I honestly believe

politics and most of the media and academic economics is so unbelievably middle class. And because the thing you need to understand is when the crisis is a crisis of inequality, it's good for the middle class. And for our American viewers, in this country, the middle class basically means the top 10%, right? Those guys, it's working for them, it's working for them, it's working for them. And the reason I switched to YouTube is because I honestly believe we will never

be given progress by these guys who benefit from our impoverishment. They don't even realise it. I don't know if you remember, there was this whole period, and it's still happening now, by the way, there was this whole period of the vibes are off. Did you hear this term, the vibes are off? It was an American term, which was basically, why is everybody so unhappy when the economy is so good?

There was an article in The Financial Times, a couple of weeks ago, by smart journalist. The guy does their diagrams. It's John Burdle. Smart guy. And it included the line, probably slightly paraphrasing here. The situation for the poorest is unambiguously good.

All right, and I don't know this guy, John Benjamin. I'm sorry to him if he's watching, because he's not an attack on him, because this is the kind of thing I see throughout economics, all right? I suspect this guy is not in the poorest, and I suspect no one in his family is, and I suspect that many of his friends are. Let's bring in the poorest person, you know, so many of the poorest 10%, and ask them, do you think the situation for you in the last 10 years have been unambiguously good? These guys can't afford to turn the fucking heating on. Yeah. Yeah, it's, I think, I think,

We and increasingly, I see myself, look, I would be open to working with labour. I'd be open to working with the Conservatives. I'd be open to working with reform. I want to build power amongst the ordinary working people of this country because I don't trust these guys who are almost always in the top 10% to deliver for us.

I wasn't expecting you to hear you say that you've worked with reform as well, to be honest with you. Mate, listen, this is not a fucking joke what's going to happen here. Your point is basically it doesn't matter about their politics if they want to take wealth inequality seriously or work with them. I've been betting on this for 14 years now, right? It was 2011 I started betting on the economy getting worse and worse and worse. Alright.

That's when I realised this was going to happen and I've been betting on it year after year and I make money year after year and I see it happen year after year and it's not a fucking joke, right? This means people can't afford to have family. This means parents skip fucking meals so the kids can eat. That's happening. And this is not just the bottom 10% anymore. You know, this is 30%, 40%, 50% and don't fool yourself into thinking this cannot get worse.

go to India, go to Brazil, you know, go to Nigeria, you know, go to Vietnam. Look at what life is like for the average person, the average person, the person in the middle. To be honest, increase, I think that life in Vietnam might be better at the middle for your normal person. And don't tell yourself, you know, don't use this classic Trump line where they're shithole countries, you know. Read Charles Dickens. You know what I mean? What was life like here, 100 years ago, for your average person?

It's the politics show cast. It's quite it's it's because you read you read that sort of writing around London like Industrial Revolution London and people and people like Dickens and people like others are like this is disgusting like this is bad you know there's there's there's pollution in the streets pollution in the water people like children are dying and

Society changes, like they do, they do sort of go, you know, actually we've got this wrong, we sort of, we need to course correct. And I suppose maybe that gives you, it could give you cause that there can be optimism about this that just because the economy is structured in the way that it is currently does not mean it could be different does not mean that something else.

Could take its place whether and you know whether that's in relation to any issue in our economy or it's like big tech fossil fuels like you take your pick You know alternatives are possible, right? Yeah things can change things can change I mean the the speed with which living standards increased after Second World War compared to what they were like 50 60 years before was unbelievable You know I talk about what my dad's life was like and he was burning less than average salary and I

By no means did he ever live a life of luxury, but you know, you got Dickens is not long before they make my dad sound fucking old. But it wasn't, you know, Dickens talking in the late 19th, the late 19th century, you know what I mean? We're talking about 70 years before the speed of that change, the speed of that change of what life was like at the middle or even, you know, in the bottom half that speed was unbelievably quick. So it can be done, but the flip of that is

things can get worse as well. And if this, the last 70, 80 years we've had here in the UK, in the US, in most of Europe, in most of the West, that is the historical, that is not the historical norm, that is the Aboriginal manatee, right?

I would argue that is because we fought for a fairer share and we fought for a fairer taxation system and how easily that can be lost. We've lost that taxation system now, we've lost it in the 80s and really since then all you've seen is increases inequality and significant decreases I would argue in living standards for ordinary people.

Yes, 100% in there is hope. And I think, you know, look, and obviously, you know, nobody alive now is around it, the speed of those increased in living standards because you reduced inequality. Unbelievably rapid increase in living standards. But you have to be realistic. Look at the political situation now.

We will 100% get changed. I guarantee you that if we speak again in five years, 10 years, the political situation, the economic situation will be dramatically different. And the reason for that is it is not politically sustainable to consistently drive down the living standards for majority of people. People don't want that, right? People don't want their kids to be poorer than they are. People don't want their grandkids to live in poverty. So politicians have to offer something new and eventually they have to deliver something new.

But if you look around now, we'll get it. I mean, you're seeing it now. You're seeing it now, you're not. If you look around now, people hate the Conservatives, they hate Labour. And I could have said the same about the main political parties in France, in Germany, in America, in basically every country. People hate the old political parties because they know the state's quo is failing. They want something new. But in every country, including this country, who is first delighted to be that new thing?

and I think you'd have to be terribly naive now to not see anything other than anti-immigrant political parties taking power all across the West within the next five, ten years. I think that's never to begin to happen. They're not going to take action in equality. They're not, so if I'm right that inequality is the cause, if you look at their policies, you know, Trump comes in, slash attacks on the rich, straight away, well that's going to make inequality worse, they're not going to take action in equality and all that means is things are going to get worse and then

You know, on compounds on itself. Well, I'll make my predictions for you now. You know, this is, you know, come back, bring me on in 10 years. You've got to track record of betting successfully as well. Yeah, these guys will get into power. They won't take action on inequality, which means they'll fail on the economy. Living stands will continue to fall. And what would they do? What would they say? They will say this is because

The centre, the more centrist factions of our party, they might be the more centrist in reform, it might be the Conservatives, stopped us from being as serious an immigration as we needed to be. So after they reduce immigration to zero, and that doesn't work, what comes next? You've got to start kicking people out. You know, I watched the interviews of people being interviewed in Washington, D.C. A lot of people saying deport them, deport them, you know.

That's where we're going, right? That is where... I said it last year and I said it two years ago. That's what happens when the centre fails. That is what happens when the centre fails. I think it was Milton Friedman said, at times of crisis,

your new solution will be chosen from the ideas lying around at the time. And it is extremely obvious what the loudest idea lying around is at the moment. And what I am trying to do, I'll work my tits off, to build another idea, which is the reason you're getting poorer, is because of aggressive increases in wealth inequality. It's because your wealth is going to the rich. The rich are getting richer. They are out-competing you for the basic resources you need, and unless you stop that, you will keep getting poorer.

And I would love for people to get behind that, you know, if you don't want to see in the next 10 years people being deported from this country, you know, and history tells us this doesn't even need to be recent migrants, you know. Read your history books and see what happened in not just Germany in the 20th century, but a lot of places in the 20th century, you know. My grandparents were deported from the country, they were in, you know, this is

If you don't want that, you need to get behind building an alternative message. And for me, honestly, I think this message that the problem is the super-rich, the problem is growing inequality, is the only message that can compete with the problem is finance, the problem is migrants. And history shows us where that can end up. Yeah. I said I'd ask you about Liz Truss, and we kind of went in a different direction, but obviously she was out there at the inauguration. And actually, the way we talk about her is in contrast to the Reeves budget, because

The start of this year, we also saw an increase in government borrowing costs. You know, I think the sort of just servicing the debt now is something like 100 billion. You know, it's lumpy 100% debt is 100% GDP. And I guess I didn't invite your comments about the difference between the Reeves and the trust budget that both saw this kind of.

admittedly at differing speeds, increasing government borrowing costs and why perhaps the Reeves budget didn't lead to the same kind of sense of like chaos and collapse that happened as a result of the trust budget and the differences between them. Yeah look I think it's pretty clear from things I've put out I think I've said I'm not Reeves's biggest fan but I think the comparisons with trusts are unlucky. I think the correct term is unlucky because what trusts did

And the way that she did it was quite, well, it was wild and deeply irresponsible. And the results in financial markets were extremely chaotic as a response of a bad strategy and a badly implemented strategy, badly prepared strategy by her. I say what you like about Gistammer and Rachel Reeves.

Wild and chaotic are probably not terms that you could fairly accuse them of. You could say that they made some mistakes in their budget. I think forcing themselves to raise specifically employers' national insurance was probably a bad idea. Maybe they thought they had to do it during the election. The budget was pretty mild. It was pretty mild. They came in, they increased spending a bit, they increased taxation a bit, they increased borrowing a bit. It was a mild budget. And on the day of the budget itself, markets

They responded in a pretty mild way, basically, because it was a mild budget. They then had the bad luck of an increase in global interest rates.

The problem you have in the UK is, the UK has a kind of uniquely specific set of bad things happening, which is inflation is high, higher than in Europe, for example, which means that interest rates are high, so interest rates are significantly higher here than the high in Europe. Growth is low, growth is only 1%. So debt as you say is high. So if you have a situation where

When they did the budget, the rate's about 4%, and you've got growth of 1%, and you've got inflation of 2.5%. I think you need to understand a little bit the maths here, right, which is inflation chips away at your debt. And that is why governments can get away with increasing their debt every year, because inflation is fighting against it, GDP growth is fighting against it. Could you get 2.5% inflation? Even at 1% growth, you can afford to pay 3.5% interest and your debt is stable.

But once those interest rates get up to sort of four, four and a half, putting up to five percent, it starts to look unstable and the government situation starts to look shaky. So the government, they were unlucky, but also they weren't unlucky. In the sense that we

I speak about this again and again, I talk about it a lot on the channel. We knew at the very beginning of COVID that the way we were going to deal with COVID would significantly deteriorate government finances. And we should have known that it would also significantly increase the wealth of the richest, which had a significant risk of causing inflation crisis. And you can go and look, I put a video around 2020. I think it was June 2020 in my first video where I said, this is going to cause a collapse in

government finances, which could well cause austerity, it will cause a massive increase in the wealth of the richest, which will probably cause an inflation crisis. It's exactly what these things were not unpredictable. In fact, I predicted them, right? So we knew for the whole of COVID that we were going to massively increase inequality and massively deteriorate the government financial situation. Once you do that, these kind of situations that the government has got themselves into now were always a risk.

And we had a period two, two and a half years where the economy was basically closed, where we could have had that discussion of, okay, either we try and claw some of that money back, which means we try and figure out how do we tax the country's richest people, or we accept that there is a very real possibility that we will have to close down parts of the welfare state. Because that is what happens when you become poorer. You have to sell things. You lose the ability to afford things.

Comparisons with trust are unlucky. Look, Rachel Reeves is not his trust. I think that's clear. Rachel Reeves is I think there is perhaps a lack of ambition, not specifically from Reeves. I've never met Reeves. You could be a lovely person, but from the economic establishment in general, a lack of ambition. What she did was incomparable to trust in terms of madness, basically. I don't think Rachel Reeves, while she could be accused of being

Unambitious and not sort of seeing the big picture. She's not wild and crazy. But the truth is we are in a situation now unarguably where government financial plans are at the whims of the financial traders. And what I want to make clear is if your plan is

to give all of your wealth away as a government and then borrow it back to pay for the things that you need, which has been, you know, that's a combination of the conservatives and labor. But that is what we've done as a country. If your plan is to give your wealth away and borrow it back, you will always be at the whims, at the behest of the financial markets. You'll be the best of the lenders, you'll be at the whims of the rich, because your plan is to borrow it back. And that is what happened. This is what happens, not just to the UK, but to any country,

which gives all of its wealth to the rich, and takes taxing the rich off of the table of policy options. That's obvious. If I give you all of the wealth, and my plan is, well, whatever we do, we can't take any money from Ollie, for no one else is going to get very fucking much. And the problem is, this only gets worse because the wealth of the rich will compound, they will get richer, they will get richer, they will get richer. If we do not

Find ways to tax them. If we do not fix that problem or these guys aren't untaxable, then we will lose everything over time. I want to talk specifically about what those measures might look like in a second. But in that period from June 2020, when you put that video out to now, you know, tons has happened, right? Your platform has grown exponentially.

book deal, hardback, paperback, etc. And obviously you get a bigger platform, more attention and also more scrutiny. I think specifically as well, the FT has kind of challenged some of the claims that you made in that book. I mean, primarily about the claim that you were the most profitable trader at Citibank.

How do you, first of all, well, how do you answer those criticisms? But secondly, how do you interpret that increase in scrutiny? Do you view it as sort of fair media challenge to sort of your public statements? Do you view it as because the ideas that you're espousing present a challenge to some of these established interests? I think the reason, I mean, obviously you'd have to ask the guys at the Financial Times, the reason that

Basically, the same article got put out in the Daily Mail months before, and the same article put out in the financial careers. And I know basically why it's happened. It's one guy I used to work with. Has basically sort of really, really got to be in his bonnet about this thing, unfortunately. I'll be very clear. I was Citibank's most profitable trader in 2011. This was always my glut. I've been very specific. I've written a book about it. Very, very, that is true. That is a true claim.

But obviously, you say that, and then you give interviews, and they run a headline, guaranteed it was the best trade in the world of all time, which is what the media do. And if you read the book, you'll see there was another guy at Citibank who was fucking legendary trader, best trader in Citibank, every single year, 2008, 2009, 2010, not 2011, because it was me, 2012, 2013. And this guy is obviously, it's a legendary trader, right? So I think it's kind of,

This guy, I think what happened was, I tried to speak this guy before the book. I thought that he was quite emotionally exposed in the book, so I tried to sort of prep him. And you do kind of, you obscure the identity of a lot of the things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but this funny thing happened, right? So when I wrote the pitch, I used all the real names. And I sent it to my agent, and then my agent said, before we send it out, you've got to change all the names. And my background is not writing, right? So it hadn't even occurred to me, you've got to change the names, right? So what I did was,

I texted all of the guys in book. I texted them. And I said, yeah, I said, I'm writing this name. I'm writing this book and you're in it and I've got to change your name. And they all sent back the most like ridiculous comedy names, you know, like, I just couldn't use like, I couldn't use any of their names. But they knew the book was coming out. But I think what it was was, and obviously you have to ask him really.

Obviously, if you'll make texture right in the book, you just think, this is fucking gonna go nowhere, basically. And then there was this massive press campaign, right? And I think this guy had just maybe started just kind of shitting himself a bit, basically.

And I tried to speak to him about it, but he was blowing up. He was like, you weren't the best trade though. And I was like, listen, it's a very specific claim. You weren't the best trade in 2011, which I was. He's like, you weren't the best trade. So it's kind of. It was like 35 mil, wasn't it, P&L? Yeah, 2011. And the FTI was like, well, this other guy made a billion in 2008. And you're like, well,

That's not 2011. It's ridiculous. I've been very clear about, I've never claimed to be George Soros. I'm not a billionaire here. One day, Gary. In 2011, I was a city bank stock trader. I got paid a lot of money. So do you think it's ego of that guy? Do you think there's something more? Because at the end of the day, right, if we look at the media environment in the UK, I don't want to put words in your mouth. If you disagree with this, you can tell me so. But there's a lot of billionaire owners of the media in the UK.

There's clearly, you know, some political interest for the reason that people buy media organizations. I'm not making this accusation specifically about the financial times to be clear that media buys you influence. And therefore, if someone comes along, starts putting a bit of profile being like, the root cause of the problem in our economy is wealth inequality. That clearly poses a challenge to the interest of a lot of these media owners. Do you view it as that? Or do you think it is just sort of this? You know what? My honest opinion is probably not. My honest opinion is probably not. I think that

But the weirdest thing I had before the article came out, everybody messaged me. There's only two guys named in the article views their names. They both messaged me. The journalist messaged me. And they all basically said the same thing was, which was, please talk about this article on your YouTube channel and mention me by name. And it was just crazy. These guys all basically came in and said the same thing. And it was just sort of like, and I think that kind of makes you kind of realize what happened, which is like,

my profile blew up and I became kind of like this buzzy thing for a bit and then you're a journalist at the financial time, someone comes in and you're just thinking, maybe I can get a lot of fucking clicks off of this guy's face and then, you know, it's the way it works. Yeah, you work in media, you know what I mean? There's always a reason we want to speak to you, right? Like people don't know what you have to say. Obviously, and you know,

They have to contact me beforehand. But obviously, I just send everything. Anyone who contacts me gets sent to Penguin. I get 100 emails a day, right? Goes to Penguin, goes to Penguin. And Penguin say basically, say no comment. And it is very frustrating to be accused of being a liar when you haven't lied. And to be forced to just say no comment on it. But I think they're right. Because the thing is, you will have probably witnessed this, right? You have a public profile, right?

there will have been a first time somebody online accuses you of something that is like wildly untrue. And your first instinct is to be like, that's untrue. But as soon as you bite on it, you've lost. As soon as you bite on it, you've lost. So I think this is because then everybody comes here and because the thing is you are the story, you are the story. And there's all of this, there's this really consistent like popular theory on me, which is that I'm always on cocaine.

It's every video, every video, this guy's underneath it that like, oh my god, this guy's obviously, they'll be, they'll be people. They'll be finished the interview I need to do online. They'll be people. Under this, you'll look, if you see in the comments of this, they'll be like, look at this guy's office tits on cocaine. Every single time, man, people won't believe this. I've never taken cocaine in my life. I was expelled from school at 16 for smoking weed and I was like, this is it. We're not doing it anymore. But there's nothing you can do and I think this is... I've had that one. I've been accused of doing gear. I had sometimes I have like,

a bit of a nervous tick, I was at the Cambridge Union and I was like, I kept sort of grabbing my nose like this and they were looking at me on the gear. But because of my interview with you guys last year, I came in and I swore my tits off. Because the thing, what people don't realise is, I was on a media blackout for a year.

They put me on a media blackout for a year, and what we want is for you to be everywhere when the book comes out. So I've written this book and I thought the book was really good, and I was like, I think this book's going to blow up. And you're seeing these fucking...

terrible political and economic decisions like destroying the country and you can't say anything you can't say anything and this was the first interview I did and I was so like it was like it all came out let's go yeah so then I think to be fair actually having looked back at the interview I did with you guys last year I can see why I've got some cocaine but um look I think it's just

This is my life now. People will say shit about me, you know. Some guys come up and go and slap me with a fish and it'll be on the front page of the Daily Mail or go and slap the guy with a fish and that's my life now. That's right. And making that adjustment, right? It's kind of peculiar, right? Because at the end of the day, the thing we're talking, I know it affects everyday people, but at the end of the day, we are still talking about like economics and you wouldn't necessarily say that's the most, I think like grabs the public's imagination to a particularly high level and yet.

there is this huge, well, I mean, we find it with our interviews, whether we interview you, whether we've interviewed other economists, like people want to understand the way the economy operates and why they feel like the way they do. And crucially, I think, this like disassociated effect of when Evan Davis puts up the graph that shows that GDP per capita growth is grown exponentially, or they hear someone like Joe Biden or Kamala Harris basically being like, you know, the last four years have been good. And they're going, but they have not for me. And that and that disconnect between

Not just media commentary, but political commentary, and their day-to-day experience. And you can pick any political issue. I don't want to talk about any of the wars that we have going on right now. But again, they can see things on social media that like, horrify their basic humanity. And then the way that a politician talks about it, or the way that it's represented the media, go, listen, that does not represent what I've seen today on my Twitter feed, or whatever it is. And I think that gap

between like reality, everyday experience versus the depiction and representation of a thing. As that widens, that is the sort of the space in which the political extremism that you're referencing, that's where it comes into the picture and that's where it starts to flourish. Yeah, but it's also why my YouTube is so popular in a way. And I think it's one thing you recognize when you're a trader is

Traders don't watch the news. Traders don't watch the news or they have their own sources of news. And you realize that most of the things which are reported in the news, they don't affect the markets, which means probably they don't have a significant effect on the economy. And yet really big things happen that affect the economy, which is never in the news, basically. But then that makes sense, right? Because

the traders get paid a million pound a year and the economists doing research for your news show gets paid like probably like 30 grand a year. So like the fact is unfortunately like the economic product on the news

is kind of shit. And it will be because you can't afford me. You couldn't afford to pay me what it would cost you to pay me to do this show. You couldn't because a bank will pay me like 50 grand a day. You know what I mean? To sit on a trading floor. So you can't afford that product. But that in itself is a product of wealth inequality. Because if you have this group of super rich people that can pay me 50 grand a day to sit in a skyscraper behind 12 screens,

Well, of course you're not going to get the best economic analysis because you can't compete with those guys.

That's it. Isn't it? It's like on the trading floor. There's a guy plugged into a Bloomberg terminal. He's got all his screens and maybe like up on the pillar BBC news might be running in the background on mute and every so often the desk like when I promised to resigns they might unmute it to hear the speech. I was still turning on if there's a football game. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that's the way that works. Okay, so let's say then Gary, rather than me being sat here with you now, it's Rachel Reeves. The Labour Party has had the luxury of not having to pay you 50 grand a day. They get

you're unfiltered insights, they get your unfiltered analysis, and Rocha Reeve says to you, Gary, how do I stimulate the economy? How do I address wealth inequality? How do I make life better in this country for millions of people? What measures are you sort of, if you get that time with her, what ideas are you putting in her head? Well, I think if you'll be realistic, you have to accept that this is going to be fucking difficult, fucking difficult for a variety of reasons.

It's not practically easy to tax these guys, right? In some ways it is because they own the assets, right? And the assets are fixed and you wanna tax the assets, right? But the real big difficulty about it is they're unbelievably powerful in terms of political power and media power. And they will push all of that against you. They will push everything they can against you. And I think, but the second thing is it is actually difficult to do. You need to be, people always,

People are worried when they see my videos and I say tax the rich. Even if I'm really explicitly clear, I'm not talking about taxing wages. I'm not talking about taxing work income. I'm talking about taxing hoarded assets accumulate the wealth of above 10 million or about 5 million, which excludes the vast majority of what people will ever achieve. They're worried that I'm going to say do that. The government will

coming with some tax that's supposed to tax the rich. The rich will avoid it and it will end up hitting people in the middle. They're worried about that. And I am 100% worried about that as well. I'm not naive to think that's not a risk. That is 100% a risk. And I always remember, I always remember when the conservatives brought in their extra tax on the extra stamp duty on second homes.

3% extra stamps you can buy in a second home. And there was an exemption in there for anyone who buys seven or more at the same time, and Jeremy Hunt bought seven properties. So this can happen. This 100% can happen. But really,

That's not a technical difficulty, that's a problem of corruption. It says that's what it is, the problem of corruption, which is there's this situation where imagine my channel grows really, really, really big and this starts to be like the popular demand. Listen, you need to take action on inequality, you need to action on tax avoidance, tax avoidance, you need to take action on tax at the very rich.

These guys, they might have to bow to public pressure, right? And they second, we have to bring an attacks on the very rich. Their donors, behind the scenes, are gonna lobby them. And they're gonna say, oh, but you can't, but you can't tax this kind of wealth. Not all of them. It's not that, we need that, right? And then they riddle it with loopholes, and they end up avoiding it. Like this is 100%, 100% a risk, 100% a risk. I know it, I know it's a risk. I don't campaign for what I campaign for, because I think it's easy to get it. I think in actuality, I think we won't get it.

And that's why I can't paint what I can't paint because if we don't get it, what happens is that 1% gets richer and richer and richer and richer. Let me ask you a question. UK economy is going to 1%.

What rate does a rich person's wealth go at? Much faster than 1%. In the first year of COVID, these guys grow, I think 22%. But you know, 5% is quite modest. These guys probably make 70%. So if these guys' wealth is growing at, say 5%, let's be conservative, and the UK economy is growing at 1%, where's the fucking wealth coming from?

Do you think it's a coincidence that at the same time, we've seen the largest and fastest ever increase in millionaire and billionaire wealth, that stock markets across the world are at an all-time high, that the gold prices at an all-time high, that housing prices are at an all-time high? Do you think it's a coincidence that that massive increase in the wealth of the richest has happened at the exact same time as a collapse in Living Standard ordinary people? It's not a fucking coincidence, right? If you don't take action, they will fucking eat you. They will eat the middle class. If you look at the history, the history,

beyond the last 70 years, it is a tiny, super rich elite and a vast majority of impoverished masses. And that's not just history. That is what life is like now in Brazil, in South Africa, in India, in Pakistan, all over the world, right? And it can happen here, it can happen here. So, if Rachel Reeves was here now, listen, this is a fucking 10 year project. This is a 10 year project and it's gonna be fucking hard. It's gonna be fucking hard to get the guys in there who make the taxes to not have them corrupted.

Because you have billionaires outside that will pay a lot of fucking money to corrupt those tax makers. A lot of fucking money. But the thing is, if you don't take capture now, it doesn't get any easier because those billionaires get richer and richer. What I would like to point out is that we did it before.

We did it before. We did it after World War II. And it will not be fucking easy. And I don't expect the fucking win. But if I don't win, then what you see is greater and greater inequality, greater and greater poverty year after year. And you see our grandkids living like fucking Charles Dickens. I'm not fucking joking about that. It can happen here. It can happen here. And if you don't believe me, just look at what's happening now. In this country, here today, half the country struggles to simultaneously feed their kids and heat the hump during winter.

That will get worse. That will get worse. So, if Rich Arruz was here, I'd say, give me your email. Let's stay in touch because this is a big, I'm not talking. We're not going to fix this tomorrow. We're not going to fix this tomorrow. This is a fight that we have to fight for our long time.

Gary Stevenson, it's been an absolute pleasure as always having you in the studio. I think that call to arms is possibly the best place we could end it. Trading game in paperback out on the 30th of January. If you're one of the people that somehow didn't buy it because it wasn't a warm bestseller, you'll have to get the paper back. Gary, thank you so much for coming in. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.