Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Christian Guru Murthy and this is the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about their big ideas and the events in their lives that have helped shape them.

My guest this week is Gary Stevenson. Now Gary was a working class kid who got expelled from school for dealing drugs, but he was very, very good at maths. He went to the London School of Economics and Oxford University, and he became a trader,

and he became one of the most successful traders in the city of London,

and he made the bank millions, and he made millions for himself.

And then he left, very young, partly in disgust, at the system in which he was playing a part.

And he now spends a lot of time making YouTube videos and doing interviews and he's written a book, a memoir,

about everything that he sees is wrong with the way British capitalism works and what the answers might be. So welcome to the podcast, Gary.

Thanks having me.

How would you change the world? I think the way we need to change our world is to tax the

richest people in society much, much more. Why? Why would that make a huge difference?

I developed this idea when I was working as a trader, all right?

So I started working as a trader 2008, straight out of LSC, which is obviously Lehman crisis.

And my job was trading interest rates.

So to simplify quite extremely, interest rates go up when the economy is strong or when inflation is overheating, and they come down when the economy is weak.

So in 2008, Lehman crisis, all of the rates go to zero, and then suddenly we're betting on

when will the economy recover. It's quite interesting, right? So in 2008, bringing rates to zero

is like an emergency measure, right? Before 2008, they used to do things like cut rates from

five and three quarters to five and a half.

Everywhere in the world suddenly slashes it to zero. And the economic theory tells you this should cause a massive economic recovery.

And we obviously know now that didn't happen. But at the time, every single year, the economists, the traders, the markets, said next year, rates will go up, which means next year the economy will recover.

Every single, literally every year, 2008, 2009, 10, 2011, all the way until 2020.

And it wasn't until COVID when they finally said, okay, rates will stay zero forever.

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