PROFIT AND LOSS

Gary Stevenson has earned the moniker The People’s Economist thanks to his no-bullshit approach to finance but, as he explains, there’s so much more to him than the ‘tax the super rich’ campaign for which he’s become famous

Interview by Daniel Davies

It’s Gary Stevenson’s choice to meet in a coffee shop in Canary Wharf. The location is a stone’s throw away from where he used to work, at Citibank in London’s financial district, and not too far from where he grew up, watching the skyscrapers he would go on to thrive in being constructed from a mid-terraced house in Ilford, East London.

Stevenson feels comfortable here. You can see it in the way he’s dressed – cargo shorts, a T-shirt and hair buzzed to within an inch of its life – and the way that he carries himself – proudly working class, but with the confidence of a maths prodigy who can say that he was once ‘the best trader in the world’ and there be at least an argument for it.

He’s been talking a lot recently. Eighteen months after it was first released, he’s still on the promotion trail for his wildly successful memoir, The Trading Game, which details his entry and exit from the dark heart of the financial industry. He’s also busy fronting his popular YouTube channel, Gary’s Economics, his main platform for educating the masses on money. You may also have caught one of his many TV, podcast, magazine or newspaper appearances, where he usually, with righteous anger, argues for taxing the ‘super rich’.

But Stevenson is more than a walking, talking economics textbook. He’s a man who’s existed and thrived in an uber-masculine environment and witnessed how mental health issues are rife among ‘successful’ men. He’s had depression himself and come out the other side of it. He’s also someone who’s used work and money and success to hide what was happening internally. Sound familiar? In short, he’s someone we could all learn something from, and when the opportunity presented itself, we absolutely wanted to speak to him.