How Millionaire Bankers Actually Work-by Gary Stevenson

Gary Stevenson, Citibank’s top trader in 2011, thrived in a high-pressure, risky environment but later grappled with ethical implications and sought change.

My name’s Gary Stevenson. In 2011, I was Citibank’s most profitable trader in the world. This is everything I’m authorized to tell you about being a trader for one of the world’s biggest banks. You become the best trader in the world for one of the biggest banks in the world, and then somebody sits you down and threatens you basically like a gangster. It kind of makes you realize that they’re the same f — -ing people. When I started working, it was this kind of a bit of a mad environment. I’m always reminded of, you know when you hear footballers talk about like footballers from like the ’90s and the 2000s talking about when they came through, and the stupid, like, hazing rituals and stuff? On my first week, they made me buy like 100 burgers and carry them up and like give them around the trading floor, this kind of thing. There was a lot of that kind of nonsense going on, and there was a lot of people getting taken out to expensive restaurants and clubs and taken out to holidays. I got taken to Vegas when I was 21.

Before, I went to Jay-Z’s after-party in LA, and then I went to Carmen Electra’s birthday party. I hadn’t even started working full time. And one of the nights, I can’t even remember, it must’ve been like $20,000 or $30,000 one night, you know, Vegas club. To me, it was really weird because, you know, I come from a very poor background, and I was in a VIP table in LA with a bunch of, like, 35-year-olds who were paying girls who looked just like the girls I used to hang out with at uni to hang out with them. You know what I mean? My specific desk started to make enormous amounts of money, which was like, it was really crazy for me. I was super young. Some of the guys I was working with, like pretty crazy guys, and they started getting like really big for their boots. And one of the guys immediately got one of the secretaries pregnant, like within a week. What it meant was the amount of money we were getting paid just for sitting in our seats went up a lot, which meant that you could afford to lose a lot of money without it appearing like you were losing a lot of money. So, for example, if you’re making 100 grand a day for the bank just for sitting in your seat, you can afford to lose 100 grand down on bad bets and not actually be officially losing money. Obviously, I know now that there’s like this massive stereotype that traders take cocaine. So I was expelled from school for selling 3 pounds’ worth of cannabis when I just turned 16, and I was like, that’s it. No more drugs. I’m off drugs. No more drugs ever again.

So I’ve never taken cocaine in my life, and, you know, I turn up in the place, everyone’s like going out partying till like 2 a.m., 3 a.m., and getting to work at 5 in the morning. And I was like, how the f — — do these guys do it? You know, they’re older than me as well. But by my late twenties, some of my mates were taking cocaine. And they were doing that thing that people on cocaine do, where they talk, like, just at you a lot really quickly, and they’re being really boring, but they don’t notice they’re doing it. And then, of course, that is what my whole career had been like. And then I realized, like, f — — me. Were those guys just on cocaine the whole time? And then since then, one of my colleagues who is very upset about the book came out and said he spent, I think he said he was spending 80,000 pounds a year on cocaine. Yeah, which is … But the funniest thing is like, I had no idea what was happening. I had no idea what was happening. I thought he was an alcoholic. Probably the maddest thing was, again, this guy, Rupert, from a very rich background, but he really took to me really quickly and, you know, sometimes I feel bad about the way I portray him, because he really was good to me. He really like sponsored my career, drove me through, and he would take me out like with all of his mates. And he lived in Clapper, and I lived in Milford, which is like totally opposite ends of London. And he’d take me out with all his Clapper mates and we’d be going to f — -ing Movida, which is a big, expensive club, and, like, expensive restaurants and, you know. He’d normally let me go like around midnight, because otherwise I’d missed the last train and he’d have to pay for a taxi. But it was like, “No, stay.” He kept me out later and later. In the end, I stayed around, ended up staying around his place. I woke up, I felt like s — -. I went into the office, I just threw up. You know, I had to go to the bathroom, just threw up. And the boss sent me home. Next day, I came in early and the boss was like, “Oh, did Rupert do that to you?” And I just laughed, you know. Then when Rupert came in, the boss goes to him. Gary said, “You did that to him.” And I knew that he’d be furious, right? And at the time, he used to sit two seats to the left of me, but there was an empty seat between us, and I just thought, don’t look at him, just don’t look at him. I could kind of feel him like burning through my cheek. And then I start to hear like, at first, just kind of like a gentle growling, like a growling in the back, like a “grr,” like this. And then I just think, f — -, just don’t look at him, don’t look at him. And it starts to get like louder. This growling gets like louder and louder. He’s on the trading floor in front of everyone. I’m just thinking s — -. And then I hear like, this bang, this big bang, right? And then I think like f — -, I better turn around now because like what the f — — has he done? We used to have like all the computing stations were like behind these doors, and he’d kicked the door so it like smashed into the brackets, and he was just kicking like that.

And he was turned around in his chair, like leaning over towards me like that like that “grr,” like gnashing his teeth like a f — -ing dog at me and growling at me, like “grr.” And I just looked at him, and he did it for about, it must’ve been at least 10 seconds, just like growling, gnashing his teeth at me in front of everyone. And then I just f — -ing looked back, and then he just, the growling started to just chill, and then he just kept on with his work, and he never mentioned it again. That was it. There’s these brokers who kind of match the traders together, and their job is to help you get deals done. You know, you say, “I want to buy here,” and they’re supposed to find a seller. But in reality, what they were doing a lot of is basically taking people out. And they had this kind of really interesting skill. They know what you’re like. So, you know, one of the guys wanted to go to like fancy restaurants and drink red wine, another guy wants to get like VIP tables at fancy nightclubs, and another guy wants to get taken on holidays, another guy wants to go to sports events. But the truth is, when I got taken out by these guys, even when I went to Vegas, we were going to like celeb parties in LA and Vegas, for me, it was work. It was just work, and I was just trying to sort of be the Gary that these guys wanted me to be. And it was quite fun. I didn’t really realize. Because most people that go in there now come from rich backgrounds. Their dad was rich, their mom was rich, their friends are rich, all their mates have similar jobs, all their mates go to these VIP clubs, you know. They’re booking tables, and they go into fancy restaurants. For them, it’s just part of their social scene. But for me, it was totally taking me out of the social scene I was from. So I kind of hated it to be honest. And plus, there’s this weird thing that happens where like brokers will take you to like, I remember they took me to watch England, my first England game, and then the next day, they’re like, “Oh, can you do this deal for me?” And then you realize like, oh, there’s a kind of f — -ing like hidden little quid pro quo here, which I wasn’t really comfortable with. So eventually, like I started to just like say, “Look, I don’t meet no brokers, I don’t go for no dinners.” I instituted “Nando’s only” rule. So for Americans who don’t know what Nando’s is, Nando’s is a popular grilled chicken chain. I said, if you want to meet Gary, you go to Nando’s Canary Wharf. I pay for me, you pay for you. That’s the rule. But then, by then, I was like the biggest trader, like one of the biggest traders in the world. So like, so many people wanted to go to Nando’s with me. I was eating f — -ing Nando’s every day. So I just sort of like cut it off. I became very antisocial actually. I think people realize like, Gary’s just not this kind of kid. You know, the brokers, the traders maybe are not socially aware to realize it, but the brokers, because their job is kind of party people. And also, a lot of the brokers come from poorer backgrounds and come from my neck of the woods.

They realize very quickly Gary is just here pretending to have a good time so that other traders have a good time, because that’s exactly what they’re doing. And they realize like, listen, Gary just doesn’t really want, this is not his game really. And they sort of let me away from that. These guys are mainly people who couldn’t cut it as traders. So they tried to like climb the greasy pole. And what they make their money on is basically internal politics. The kind of person who decides to make their money managing internal politics at an investment bank is usually a bit of a — — . The management is just like, it’s just an absolute cesspool, really. I remember talking my manager’s manager who in the book we called the Slug. I remember talking to like one of my mates on another trading desk, and he was like, “I’ll tell you what, if he was your intern, you wouldn’t hire him, would you?” So I became the Swiss franc trader when I was 22, which is really, really young. And the way it happened was my boss, who was a Swiss franc trader, quit, and a new boss got put in, and he was a really nice guy, but he seemed a little bit kind of like dopey in a way. And he come over once to introduce himself to me, and the way he introduced himself to me was he just sat down next to me and he pulled out a copy of Sports Illustrated and he flicked through the magazine. He opens it like that, like that to me. And he’s like, “Do you like that?” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s nice.” The whole, one at a time, just like that. He didn’t even say hi. He didn’t say his name. And then I figured out this guy must be the new f — -ing boss. But then, he stood up and he said to me, “What’s your job on the desk then?” And I was thinking like, I’m the desk junior, right? And I was thinking like, surely he f — -ing knows what my job is. And there’s this kind of moment where I’m looking at him, and he’s looking at me, and I’m thinking, like, f — -. And I told him I’m the Swiss franc trader, which was my old boss’ job. And he was just like, “All right, OK. All right, fine.” I loved my second boss, but he was totally insane.

I remember once he sat me down just like, “Gary, I really do apologize.” And I was like, “What for?” And he was like, “We can’t give you a salary increase.” And I’d never even asked one. And the previous year, I’d been paid 400,000 pounds, and he seemed genuinely worried about whether I could survive on it, you know? And then I just said to him, “Yeah, it’s really tough.” What else can you say to these guys? Another time, my boss threw a phone at my colleague’s head because my colleague had got angry, and he’d thrown his phone at his screens. But obviously, like now with these LCD screens, they don’t like smash. So he was like, it didn’t really, it just go … So he picked up the phone, smashing it on the desk. And then he started trying to trade through the same phone. So he was like hitting these like, “Johnny, what’s three months?” But it wasn’t working. He was just shouting, and then he just banging his phone. So then my boss shouted over to him like, “What’s wrong?” And he obviously wasn’t listening. And then he asked me what’s wrong. And I said, “I think JB’s phone’s broken.” So this boss just went over to the end, just picked up a phone and just like lobbed it in the air, landed on this guy’s head. The weirdest thing is it totally calmed him down, totally, effectively calmed the guy down. Yeah, I don’t know. The only thing I ever saw get escalated to HR was the guy who stole money from another trader. And even that, there was a general consensus on the desk that he shouldn’t have escalated to HR, that we should’ve dealt with it between us. Yeah, it was like that. There’s just like a kind of pirate ship vibe about it. You know, it’s a very masculine way of like, you know, we sort it out between us. We don’t go to HR. Because the truth is, a lot of people do do dodgy s — -. A lot people get away with it, because if you’re making money on it, management, maybe it’s changed, but management, they’re not going to ask. I was making a ton of f — -ing money, tons of money. Nobody ever asked how I was making it.

Management never asked how I was making it, because if you’re doing something dodgy, they would rather that just slide. They’re going to get paid on it rather than to find out. When you lose money, a lot of stress gets placed on you. The worst thing from my perspective and from the perspective of many traders is that you get, you’re no longer allowed to trade. And that’s what traders want to do. They want to trade. It only happened to me once. I was only once ever in the red, which was in my second full year as a trader in 2010. So I was 23. I’d put a big bet on which had some risk to Swiss interest rates. And the Swiss central bank suddenly cut rates to negative 4.5% for some crazy reason, specifically using the product that I was betting on. I lost $8 million in a week. The maddest thing about it was, it was the right bet. If I was allowed to keep that position, I would’ve made it all back. I wasn’t allowed to keep that position, so you end up $4 million in the red. Then you have to fight your way out of it. I’m pretty sure my salary was $36K when I first started, which was a good salary for the time. I mean, it’s not even a bad salary even now. P&L is profit and loss, and it’s the only thing that matters in the world if you’re a trader, basically. And every single day, every week, every month, every year, your individual P&L is calculated. Everyone’s individual P&L is calculated. And it goes around on a spreadsheet every day. So every day you get a spreadsheet that tells you every single trader’s P&L, which obviously means like if you’re the best trader, you’re the best trader. But if you’re losing money, everybody can see. It’s very clear who the best is, and it’s very clear who the worst is. And that starts to become how you interact with other people and it starts to become how you see other people. There’s this kind of beautiful fairness to it in a weird way. And I think there’s not a lot of places in the world other than sort of the football pitch where a kid like me from nowhere can come in and compete with all of these multimillionaires from rich families and be like the guy at 24. Traders in my department were getting paid about 7% of their P&L, but I didn’t know that at first. And there’s this kind of idea like you can’t ask anyone what their bonus is, so it was like really mysterious. And then this thing happened after my first bonus, the beginning of 2010, when I got paid nearly 400,000 pounds, which will be like, at the time, maybe $700,000. So much more than I’ve been expecting. And it kind of broke me a little bit and I just became like, oh my God, there’s so much money to be made here. This is it. All we’re doing now is trading. And then, obviously, the next year, I lost this $8 million in a week really quickly. And that just, again, beat me, like, you have to be better, you have to be more serious, you have to work harder. And I just became like, I became like this machine. Most of the traders, in my opinion, we’re not making huge amounts of money from taking risky positions, speculative positions. They’re making most of their money from the customers, but they’re kind of trying to pretend they’re making it from their bets. But most traders want to be making money from betting because that’s sort of the glamorous side of it, you know? Can you actually beat the market? It wasn’t really till 2011 that I started to make some big bets. You know, like I always remember, in 2011, the Japanese nuclear disaster. I made a ton of money on the Japanese nuclear disaster, not because I’d been expecting it to be a Japanese nuclear disaster, but because I was betting on economic weakness.

You bet on economic weakness, this crazy thing happens that there’s no way you could’ve predicted, you make a ton of money. Well, some people are the other way around, right? You know, some people would’ve lost a ton of money in the nuclear disaster. People sometimes turn around to me and they say, “Oh, it’s terrible that you made money betting on these things happening.” I made money from the Japanese earthquake, right? 20,000 people died in that earthquake, in the following tsunami. I didn’t make that tsunami happen. I think that’s important to realize. And these guys’ job is to bet on it and to be right on it. And they’re very, very heavily incentivized to be right. The payment structure is very weird, or at least it was back then. You would get paid a lot of money in a bonus, but it would be like deferred. So you get this money in four years. Since I left banking, this rule came in, this EU law that limited bonuses as a multiple of salary, which meant that the way payment happened is completely changed. Now, because of that bonus cap, what they will have to do instead is they massively increase your salary. And since then, salaries have increased massively, and bonuses have decreased massively, which decreases the incentivization to take risk, and it also increases the incentivization to kind of sit on your chair and sit around and like take the money. So I won a card game. I won my job in a card game. I was a very good student. I did math and economics, I got very good grades. But turns out, and I didn’t know this beforehand, the way to get a job, you have to get an internship in your second year. So you have to apply on with CVs, and people at LSE would be sending like 35 CVs to different banks. But obviously, like, because they’re from rich families, they’ve kind of prepped for this, right? So everybody has like some really quite extracurriculars, like they founded the Junior United Nations or some s — -, or they’re like concert pianist, you know? And I was like working in a sofa shop and like trying to become like a grime rapper when I was a kid.

That card game is called the trading game. It’s a betting game, basically. So there’s a special deck of cards, some low cards, some high cards, five players. We all get a card and then, essentially, we’re making bets on what the total number of the cards is. So if I’ve got a low card, I should think it’s going to be low, and I’m betting it’s going to be low. I’m making sell bets essentially. And it’s structured to be like financial markets, like a buyer price and a sale price. I had the big advantage, which was this guy had explained me the rules of the game before the game itself. Other people going into the event not knowing the rules of the game. If you are a math or economics student, when you play a game like this, you are going to immediately do this thing which you’re taught to at university in mathematical subjects, calculate the expected probability, which is like, OK, these are the cards in the game, this is what we expect it to be. Oh, but I’ve got a really low card, so it’s going to be lower, like this. Everyone’s going to do that. That is the instinctive thing that like a maths or an economics or a statistics student is going to do. So I’ve got a low card, I think total’s going to be 50. You’ve got a high card, you think total’s going to be 70. So I start saying 49, 51, you know, I’m going to trade. And you’re going to start saying 69, 71. It makes sense, but it’s actually quite a stupid thing to do. Because, №1, you immediately give away your card, first thing. But №2, if I’m there, and this guy’s quoting around 50 and you’re quoting around 70, I can buy at 50 and sell at 70 and make like 20 instant free profit. And I would, just did that. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. It’s really, really stupidly easy in a way. But I mean, of course, I was only able to do that because I had the rules in advance. That’s how I won the first round, just by kind of taking advantage of this kind of stupidity. Second round was the national finals. I developed a new strategy, which is kind of around sort of bullying the price around, manipulating the price around.

It worked really well. Then there was a final of the final, final five guys. And this is like, if you win this, you’re getting into the big thing. I came in with a really low card, really low card. So I know, thought it was going to be low. And my strategy was to bully the price up and to try and sell at a high price. So I just bullied up, bullied up, bullied it up. Game finishes. And I spent the whole game selling, at a high price. And like mathematically, it was almost impossible for me to lose, because the price was really high and my card is really low. But then when everyone turned their cards over, the other cards in the game were the seven highest possible cards, which the chance of it happening by chance are like one in or maybe like 15 million or something, ridiculously impossible chance. So I realized, I knew that the game must have been rigged, but I don’t think anyone else noticed. And I was just thinking like, what the f — -? These guys have like rigged the game against me. Then the guy goes to the front to announce the winner, and he announced that I was the winner, even though my actual score in the final, the final was like negative. And he said, Gary’s scores in the, like the warmups were so good, we wanted to test him in the final to see what he did if everything was against him, to see if he would like really back himself. And he did back himself, and that’s what we like to see. So we decided he’s the winner of the game. Even though I actually lost. Tells you a little bit about the crazy people that work in this world, I think.

The guys who did come into the card game tended to end up being really good traders at the bank. This CV cover letter, there’s a massive amount of classism in that. Because everyone has the top grade. Basically, it’s based on extracurriculars. It’s based on how good you are at like f — -ing clarinet, basically. But then, you know, kids like me will poke holes in your objective methods, but they’re probably going to be the best traders, really. So I was a trader, professional trader for Citibank 2008 until 2014. I was at LSE, the London School of Economics, before I went into banking. Everyone at LSE is obsessed with banking, obsessed with trading. So you get a good sense of what everybody wants. And back before 2008, everybody wanted to work in credit, which of course is the area that, you know, blew the global economy up. But the guys who were working in it before they blew the economy up were making a ton of money. So everybody wanted to go there. I went into this unfashionable area, because they said you can start straight away and you can start trading straight away, which is really unusual, but they let me do that. Trading sort of changed in the sort of early 2000s, 2000 to 2010. It became a lot more mathematical. There’s this cultural shift where it goes away from being these kind of guys, ex-rugby players, of which there used to be a lot of that kind of thing in banking, towards, you know, LSE graduates, Harvard graduates, you know, maths graduates, physics graduates who are very like honorable with maths. I think “American Psycho” is very good, actually. You know, it shows this guy’s in banking, and he becomes a murderer, and he’s really clearly a dickhead. But I knew people at LSE that would memorize all of his lines by heart. And they loved him, and the reason is because he’s really handsome, he’s really rich, he’s in great shape, he’s got a really beautiful girlfriend, he’s got a really expensive flat. And I think no matter how much you try to say, but he’s a dickhead. If you’ve put that in front of a 18-, 19-year-old boy, you’re going to f — — a lot of 18-, 19-year-old boys up. I had to wake up at, say, 5:30. 7:30 was like, you have to be in by 7:30, or you’re late. So I’d be up at 5:30, have my little Blackberry, looking through the emails, digging through the prices, have a bit of breakfast, have a shower, cycle down through East London, get to work, try to get there roughly about 7. So trading floor in London is massive. Massive, massive trading floor. It’s in a big skyscraper in Canary Wharf, which is in the East End of London, not far from where I grew up, not far from where I live now. It’s only on the second floor, it’s not on the top floor. The trading floors are all quite low down. These are the floors that are making the most money. Long, long rows of men with huge walls of screens, sort of, nine monitors, 12 monitors up in a big square rectangle around them. And most people have that, and they’ll be sitting back to back in these long rows. You know, it’s classic skyscraper environment. My trading desk was in the foreign exchange department, which back then had the very sort of boisterous laddish atmosphere. I came in first day in a suit and the guys were like, “No suits, no ties.” Whereas I think the European banks like Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, they like you to wear suits. And then I’d be checking my positions, you know, there was a really big rush in the morning from sort of 8 a.m. to about 10:30 a.m. dealing with all the customers. So between 8 and sort of 10:30, 11, would just be a mad rush. By then, I’d be knackered. I’d go and get massive Nando’s, sit there, smash my Nando’s down. Then in the afternoon, it’s actually quite chill, because Citibank offers a 24-hour pricing service, which means there’s a period where if you call up, you get the London trader, there’s a period where you get the New York trader, and there’s a period where you get the Sydney trader. By our afternoon, we’ve handed over to New York, they’re doing the business. So we’re sitting around, reading the newspaper, sort of chatting. But in the evening, yeah, you chill out, read the paper, check you’re making money.

I was making a lot of money, so sort of celebrate. Then we’d finish at about 5. Earlier on in my career, I’d get dragged out a lot with like the senior traders drinking and going to fancy restaurants. And I kind of hated that, to be honest. But by the end of my career, I’d say I was about 24. You know, I’d go, I’d cycle back home, I’d leave about 5, cycle home, go to the gym, cook dinner with my flatmate, you know, watch the football if it’s on. Obviously, I’m waking up at 5:30. So, you know, I wasn’t like big on the nightlife. A lot of people were waking up at 5:30 and also big on the nightlife, and I didn’t understand how they did it, but I think I understand more now. The thing is, even when you’re there, really, there’s only sort of three or four hours of hard work. And that was because I was the Euro trader, which was like, that was definitely the most work of anyone. What you really were at the time, you were the risk holder. You were the risk holder. Your job was to be the person who made the decisions and took the risk and who took the hit if you were wrong. The first thing is lots of different kinds of traders trading, lots of different kinds of things. I was an interest rates trader. It means I was borrowing and lending money. Interest rates traders borrow and lend money. And the idea is quite simple. You want to borrow at a low interest rate, and you want to lend at a high interest rate. So a lot of what is done on that desk, the STIRT desk, the short-term interest rates trading desk, is one-day loans. Corporations, pension funds, hedge funds that have loans running out will come to people like me and say, “We’ve got a loan in six months. What interest rate will you give us for a loan starting in six months’ time?” On a very, very basic level, when the economy is good, sometimes just because inflation is overheating, the central banks raise rates, and they cut rates when the economy is weak. So in a very broad sense, although we are also looking at inflation, really, we’re trying to judge the strength of economies. In my desk, there were about 10 traders, and each trader’s job was to look at a different currency and you kind of get promoted through the ranks. It’s split between what you’d call rich world currencies and what they call emerging market, poor country currencies. So on my desk, the rich world desk, we’re basically doing Europe, Japan, North America, Australia, New Zealand. First, I was, you know, desk junior, buying the coffees. Then I was New Zealand dollar trader, then I was Swiss franc trader, then eventually I was euro trader, then I moved to Japan and I was the yen trader.

As interest rates traders, we make loans, we borrow in money, we try to borrow cheap and lend high. A lot of people do that by a variety of dodgy ways. What I tried to do, and what I think is most interesting, is I did that by trying to predict strength of economies. So in 2011, by the time I become a really profitable trader, Citibank for some reason had this big thing where they wanted to become the biggest bank in the world in terms of volumes traded. And because we’re doing one-day loans, it’s massive volume. Because if you borrow money for a day, you have to come back every day. It’s stupid, but it looks like really big volume. And it meant that senior management had asked me to try to do as much trades as I could. So I was probably lending and borrowing between currencies, probably not far off a trillion dollars a day of a variety of currencies, which was ridiculous. But it’s what I’ve been asked to do. I was in a situation towards the end of my career where I was trying to get fired. I was a very successful trader, but for a very short time, and I quit when I was like 27, I think. I was just so in the game, and I was kind of, I was quite dehumanized in a way. I’d done it to myself, you know? But I mean, how do I balance this love for being the best, but also like being a human and taking care of myself and also fulfilling my responsibility through a collapsing society? The traders don’t think it’s their job, because they’re trying to do trades to make money. The politicians are trying to win elections. The academics are trying to write fancy papers. The guys in media are trying to get clicks and get views and, you know. Actually, nobody’s trying to fix it. My big success was in 2011, and that came from this realization that the economy was never going to get better, that we had a growing crisis of inequality that wouldn’t be resolved, that the rich would get richer and the ordinary people would get poorer, living standards would collapse, things would collapse. And I put that bet on. I never really stopped to think, what does that mean? Because my job was to bet on these things. You know, if your job is to look at the economy, think is it going to be strong, and is it going to be weak? That’s what you do. You know what I mean? And by the end of that year, 2011, I’ve become Citibank’s most profitable trader in the whole world by this bet that society would collapse. And everybody could see that I’d done that. Nobody turned around and said, “Should we do something?” There’s not like a bell where you can go and ring, you know. I think it’s worth realizing, right? The best-paid 10,000 economists in the world are all traders. Towards the end of my career, I decide I want to leave, and I tell my boss I want to leave. And my boss takes me out for this dinner, and he told me a story about a trader, a young trader at Deutsche Bank who, you know, nice guy, good trader, wanted to leave. The only problem is Deutsche didn’t really want him to leave, you know, so they went through all of his, looked through some of his past trades and his emails, you know. There wasn’t really anything in there, but there was enough, you know. You know what I mean? Enough to take him to court. And he rolled through court for years and years, and eventually the guy was bankrupted. And then he literally said to me, you know, “I like you, I think you’re a good person, but sometimes bad things happen to good people. We can make life very difficult for you. You’re going to find out about that.” It’s so obviously similar to the way that, like, gangsters speak. That’s exactly the same kind of person that goes into drug dealing, exactly the same kind of person. And I can’t help but think that a lot of the guys who become traders, if they grew up on the street I grew up on, would’ve been drug dealers. And a lot of the kids selling drugs in Elford, if they went to the same boarding school as Rupert and if they went to LSE, they would’ve become traders. Really. Because it’s the exact same personality type. I come from a very poor background, and the people are being hurt by what has happened in the economy are people that are exactly like me when I was a kid and people that are exactly like my mom and like my dad and like my sister and like my friends I grew up with. But it was really a long time before I ever started to explicitly think, should we do anything about this? And by then, I’ve been kind of like kicked out to Tokyo, and my junior was this very, very, very posh, very rich, very wealthy, but very smart Australian kid. And I said to him, “You know, do you think we should do something?” And he was like, “About what?” And I was like, “You know, about like a collapsing global economy.” And he was like, “Yeah, we put that trade on. We bought the green euro dollars.” And I was like, “Well, yeah, yes, but, you know, do you think we should do something?” And he was like, “I don’t understand what you mean.” You don’t go into trading to save the world, but you kind of assume that there are people whose job it is to look after the world. You know, like politicians most obviously, economists at universities, economists at central banks, like the Fed, like the Bank of England, economists in the media. You kind of think these guys, their job is to look after it. But what was becoming increasingly clear to me was, well, our job is not to fix it. Those guys whose job is to fix it, they’re definitely not going to fix it. Like, I want to leave and work for charity. And the banks are just, you know, the senior management is just very strongly implying, “Well, we’re going to sue you.” And at that point, they have no reason to sue you. They’re just going to like, “Well, you do that, we’re going to sue you.” And I think, to be honest, that high levels of banking and probably high levels of a lot of other industries, that’s how it works. Like the law is an arm of power. Like, they’re like, “OK, if you piss us off, we’re going to find a way to sue you.” And I think that is kind of how it works. So I suspect that a lot of the people who get actually sued by banks are not the people who did bad s — -. They’re the people who pissed off the wrong people. So I get 18 months like wandering around Tokyo, like studying Japanese and like learning to draw. They make me sit in the corner. So I’m just sitting in the corner of the office like studying Japanese and drawing pictures of the Beatles and stuff. In a way it was nice, it was nice, because it gave me a bit of time to sort of think about what I was doing. You know, I played that final game pretty well, despite the fact that I was in terrible mental health condition at the time. And I got them into a position where, I think, first of all, I think they thought, because I was kind of a young kid from kind of a rough background making a lot of money, I think they thought that if they dug far enough, they’d find some dodgy s — — in there. But really, I was just betting on like the world collapsing every single year. That’s what I was f — -ing doing. And in the end, two things happened simultaneously, which is I start sending these mad emails every day to like the CEO and the global head of HR. And one guy got fired, and then I get let out. So I didn’t really know whether it was because I started getting mental and causing big problems or if it was because this guy got fired. And I’ll never know which one of those things. But eventually, I got out, which is why I’m here and not stuck in a skyscraper. It’s all a big game. It’s all a big game. It’s all a big power game. And like, you can kind of get away with whatever you want, as long as it’s not in the bank’s interest to go for you. You know, and it’s horrible, but, you know, this is the world that we’ve built, you know, where if you’re very, very rich and very, very powerful, you can get away with a f — -ing lot. I don’t hate rich people. I am a rich people. I don’t blame rich people. I’m an economist that makes millions of pounds by predicting the f — -ing future and I’ve got a f — -ing good track record. These guys will get richer and richer, and they will eat the middle class alive. And it’s not because they’re bad, and it’s not because they’re evil, it’s because that’s what f — -ing compound interest does. If you are a guy who’s worth $100 million, you’re going to make $5 million a year passive income, and you are going to use that money to buy the assets that ordinary families, kids need. That is the direction of travel. That is we’re heading up. We will lose the middle class. There’s obviously that one scene in “The Big Short,” couple of guys make a lot of money by betting on like the collapse of the American economy. And they’re going to make a ton of money, and they’re really like, they’re really happy, and they’re dancing, and there’s this Brad Pitt character turns around and he’s like, “Stop f — -ing dancing.” And they’re like, “Why? We just made a load of money.” He’s like, “You made money betting on the collapse of the economy. You know what that means? That means people losing their homes, that means people committing suicide, that means families breaking down.” And obviously, for me, as someone who’s done the same thing, like, you feel that. My free market rate is $2 million a year. For three years, I was out here in the media on YouTube for free, telling people exactly what was going to happen in COVID. You can go back and look at my early videos, my early articles in 2020 predicting COVID. Everything I said was going to happen exactly happened. Nobody’s f — -ing listening. It was hard. It was hard, because you’re used to getting up, you know, I was trading nearly a trillion dollars a day, you know what I mean? And you’re used to getting up and coming to the desk and bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, smashing all that money through. And I would wake up in the morning and you just have this like energy, you know, this energy.

You know, of course I made millions of dollars, but then once you quit, your income is zero, you know. I just had this really strong feeling like you’re being unproductive, you’re wasting your time. And I went to like, I went to like psychiatry on the NHS, and then she gave me like a little timetable to fill in, put in everything you’re doing on here. And she looked at it and she was like, you’re really, really f — -ing busy. But I’d become so used to this hothouse environment where you just feel like you have to be 100% all of the time, that anything other than like working 120% felt like doing nothing to me. In the beginning of COVID, I picked up trading again, because there was a lot of money on the table. So I still do do a bit of trading. It just sits in investments, you know. Obviously, I quit my job, and the work I do now, it’s educational work, trying to explain to people the importance of inequality. I don’t get paid a lot of money for it. You know, in fact, very often, I get paid no money for it. So it funds my work, it funds my life. Hopefully one day in the future it’ll pay for me to have a family with a bit of financial security. You know, who reads articles in The Guardian about economics? Rich people, basically. And I want to talk to all the new people. So I moved to YouTube, started making a YouTube, made a load of videos, but of course, nobody was watching them. And you know, I’ve got a degree from LSE, I’ve got a degree from Oxford, I’m a multimillionaire, a very successful ex-trader.

I put videos out about economics and people say, “Who the f — — is this guy? He’s not an economist.” You know what I mean? Somebody called me up and, “I’ve read one your articles. You’ve thought about writing a book?” And I was like, “No, not really.” But then I thought, you know, if I could use this story, this f — -ing good story, you know. Expelled from school, wins a job in a card game, top trader the world by betting on the collapse of society, you know, bank tries to stop him from leaving. It’s a good story. I thought, if I could tell that story well, then hopefully you’ll know with the confidence I have that this is going to go down the toilet. And if enough people know that, then we can stop it. I’m not allowed to answer that question, unfortunately. Legal reasons, I’d love to tell you, but I can’t answer it. Yeah, yeah. It’s quite bizarre. You might think I’d be able to say, I did sign an NDA, but I can’t talk about these things. But unfortunately, I cannot discuss whether I signed an NDA or not.