294. Gary Stevenson – Is being a city trader bad?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I think we just fundamentally underestimate how important the wealth distribution is. So I get my first big bonus beginning of 2010. And how much was that? It was £395,000. March 2020, the very beginning of COVID, there'll be an inflation crisis, a cost of living crisis. The gold price will go up massively. Stock prices will go up massively. House prices will go up massively. Government austerity, huge increase in poverty. In March 2020, I said that. And we could have prevented that.
So this isn't just about taking more money off the rich.
Well, I want to be clear, I'm not trying to take money off the rich. Well, you are because you want to do wealth tax. No, no, no. Go on, go on, go on. You're wrong. We are existing in an economic state of rapid increase in wealth inequality. If you're making 5% on a billion pounds, you're making 50 million pounds a year. So one billionaire is making about a million pounds, maybe two or three million pounds a week, passive income.
I'm just going to point out that what you haven't done is address the point that I was making earlier, which is it's the taxpayer who picked up the bill.
Support for this episode comes from Octopus Energy and the founder and CEO, Greg Jackson, is with us now. So, Greg, talk to me about Kraken. What is it and why is it spinning off from Octopus Energy?
When we built Octopus, we also built a software platform, like an operating system, like iOS or Android on your phone, to enable energy companies, utilities, starting with Octopus, but frankly, anyone in the world, to be much more efficient, to use vast amounts of data, to be able to become more innovative and to serve their customers better. That piece of software is cracking. We've used it not only for Octopus, but companies in the UK like EDF and Eon have used it to improve their business too. But you know what? It turns out over time, companies realized that they were licensing from a competitor. And so we've had to spin it off so it can reach its full potential.
Yeah, makes sense, Craig. Thank you. Right, we're going to go to the episode.
Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Money with me, Robert Pearston.
And me, Steph McGovern. And with us today, Gary Stevenson, who is an equality economist. He's here to tell us why taxing millionaires is the way to make things fairer. But we've got so much to talk to Gary about that we're going to split this into two episodes. As I'm sure a lot of you know, Gary's a working class kid who became a millionaire in his 20s by being one of the best traders in the city. Betting against the economy. So we're going to talk to him about why he kept betting on the economy going wrong and how this relates to his obsession now with wealth inequality. So here's part one with Gary Stevenson. Gary, thanks for joining us. So you're a rich lad. You've done well for yourself. You know, you made quite a bit of money early on in your life, in your 20s, and kind of defied the odds to do that.
But you think rich people should be paying more tax, don't you? You've kind of got a problem with being rich, haven't you?
It's better than being poor. It's hard to be poor. Yeah, so I grew up, I wouldn't say very poor, but like pretty poor, you know, small little terraced house.
Council house, was it? No, it wasn't a council house.
Yeah, just a little terraced house on a little terraced street next to the railway, you know, sharing a bedroom with my brother in London, East London. Yeah. I always sort of dreamed of being rich and making money. And obviously all the stories are there in my book. People probably know it by now. Got into the School of Economics, won a competition, got a job in the city in 2011 when I was just 24. I was Citibank's number one trader in the world, got paid like millions of dollars in one year. So I made a lot of money very quickly. Well, I kind of had a definitely a burnout. Maybe you could stretch and call it a breakdown. I mean, my situation is quite specific because the exact way that I made my money was I was betting on, you know, the economy is going to collapse and living standards will collapse.
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