YouTuber and economist Gary Stevenson: ‘If we don’t tax wealth we’ll return to the feudal age’

We could be on the cusp of great change. No, not that one. Much too obvious. When Gary Stevenson, creator of the popular Gary’s Economics YouTube channel, drops into the Big Issue office in London, Keir Starmer’s demise and Andy Burnham’s imminent coronation is not a dead cert. But we don’t need an influencer to tell us which way the political wind blows.

When Starmer resigns a few days later, it’s no surprise. For Stevenson, the exciting change that’s coming is a proper debate around a wealth tax. The 39-year-old has built a huge following since launching Gary’s Economics in 2020 – and his backing for a new tax to tackle inequality is at the heart of his output. Now he has a new Channel 4 documentary, How To Get Filthy Rich, to propel his argument further into the mainstream.

And with Burnham almost assured of becoming prime minister this summer, Stevenson feels his big idea might also finally be ready to take centre stage.

“We are not just in a situation of high inequality,” Stevenson says, setting out his pitch right from the start.

“We are in a situation of high and rapidly growing inequality. And it is accelerating. The absence of action will lead to economic collapse.

“This is what people don’t realise. I am not the person in this country advocating for redistribution. I am the person advocating for stoppingthe redistribution that is currently happening.”

He goes further. Stevenson believes that no incoming prime minister can survive, popularity intact, in the modern political, economic and cultural reality without taking radical action on inequality. Put simply, the frustration felt by so many will be targeted at whoever is in charge if there’s no discernible change.

“Inequality is not this abstract thing. The most obvious consequence is that more and more ordinary people will not be able to own their home or accumulate a significant pension if you have this incredibly wealthy class generating enormous amounts of income, which they use to buy assets,” he says.

“For young people, buying a house becomes unaffordable. They stay on living at home into their 30s. It’s incredibly economically damaging and causes a crisis of depression. It’s also a big factor behind the homelessness crisis. Things become more expensive for everyone because these guys are super rich, so you see broad immiseration.”

So, the 24-billion-dollar question: will Burnham change things?

“We are at a point where he will have to do something,” Stevenson says.

“My worry is that it will be watered down. Wes Streeting spoke about a ‘wealth tax that works’ but he was talking about the equalisation of income tax and capital gains. It is not a policy I’m against, it is a valid thing to do, but to do that whilst allowing the very top end to continue to be relatively untaxed as they grow their wealth is absurd and won’t fix the problem.

“I really want Burnham to be good. Because if he is not, then Nigel Farage will win the next election. Even if we just talk about the economy and inequality, Farage is going to cut taxes on the rich and it’s going to be devastating for living standards.

“I have to be careful what I say about Burnham – I don’t want to jeopardise his team’s willingness to work with me. There is a realistic chance because if they don’t talk to me and Gabriel Zucman [French-American economist leading calls to implement a minimum wealth tax on billionaires], then what are they going to do? But I suspect we won’t get the seriousness we need on top-level inequality.”

Read more:

• Could a wealth tax convince young people to vote Labour?
• Poverty and inequality are slowly poisoning Britain. It could lead to a far-right victory in 2029
• Millionaires tell Rachel Reeves: Tax us more or lose to Reform in the next election

The new politics

Stevenson’s life story is compelling. He has an authenticity that’s hard to fake, and which adds gravitas and lived experience to his arguments.

Born in Ilford, East London in 1986 – “I’m not 40 yet,” he grins, youthful charm still evident. “But I’m not happy about that birthday coming up…” – Stevenson is a self-styled working-class boy made good.

“I have seen both sides. I grew up in East London. It was that classic big city immigrant culture – my mum’s from an immigrant family – which was like, we came here to make money.

“We were all poor where I lived. But when I passed my 11-plus and went to grammar school, I became visibly poor. Before that, my poverty was quite normal.”

His story is a big part of his brand. In short, Stevenson was a maths prodigy, went to the local grammar school, achieved A-grades, won a scholarship to LSE to study maths and economics, then won an internship with Citibank in a campus card game (no, really), before working his way up to the trading floor. By 24, he was earning more than £1million per year.

“When I was a kid, I thought going to LSE and working in the city would mean being surrounded by smart people,” he recalls. “But the truth is, lots of them are just rich kids who have used their privilege. They are on the fucking escalator all the way up. They don’t even need to try to succeed. So they tell themselves that the poor deserve to be poor.”

Stevenson earned massive bonuses by betting against the economy. His wealth was built on betting that the economy would recover slower than forecast and inequality would widen. He was correct. But he was not happy. After a major burnout, he took the money and quit aged just 27.

“I realised in 2011 that living standards were going to fall – and not just a one-off fall, but a continual, accelerating fall,” he says. “And that is quite something to realise. I was only 24 at the time. Betting on it, being right again and again… I’ve had to find my own ways, psychologically, to deal with that.”

Stevenson likes to remind us that he was right. Whether on his YouTube channel or in conversation, it’s a theme he returns to in order to add fuel to the fire of his economic arguments.

He is as likely to pick a fight with fellow podcasters Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart from The Rest Is Politics as take on the actual people in power. In the battle for online supremacy and influence, Stevenson lays claim to an authenticity via his lived experience of poverty that few in the field can match.

“They’re always dumping on me,” Stevenson continues.

“What they don’t understand is that I’m fucking changing politics here because I’m smart enough to see the space was in storytelling. Compelling, engaging, accessible, welcoming storytelling about politics and economics.

“And I think that still is the space. Influencer politics is going to dominate politics in the influencer age. It already is. And you will see more and more elections won by influencers because whether you like it or not, storytelling is incredibly important in politics.”

He cites Donald Trump, Farage, and, more recently, from the left, Zack Polanski and Zohran Mamdani as among the few who get the importance of storytelling. Starmer’s inability to understand this was a major part of his downfall. Stevenson returns to his doubters in the academic community.

“It frustrates me when wonkish academic economists say, ‘Gary’s not serious.’ It’s like they don’t understand – fascism is about to take over. And you guys are sitting in your ivory castles, doing inverse fucking matrices?”

In the new documentary, Stevenson meets a range of people who disagree with a wealth tax. Multi-millionaire occupant of One Hyde Park, Reform donor Bassim Haidar claims he is only interested in a return of 12% or more on investments and reveals his wealth grows by 50% some years. But he’s adamant he would leave the UK if taxed 2% of his assets over £10million.

Stevenson’s conversation with tax lawyer turned policy commentator Dan Neidle is similarly combative, with Neidle calling the wealth tax proposal “absolute populist claptrap”.

“If I’m totally honest, I’ve got a fucking incredible academic and career record in my field,” says Stevenson. “And this guy talks to me as if I’m a total idiot. They’re pissed off. They don’t like the way that I’ve not played by their rules and I’ve knocked them out the park.

“They think they own this debate but they’re not only shitty at the storytelling, they’re also shit at the economics. I’m doing it a different way. It’s not all charts and tables. But the charts and tables are there – that’s what they don’t know.”

‘The markets are not inherently right wing‘

Fun fact: it would take the average UK full-time worker 19,230,769 years to earn $1 trillion. They would have had to hold down a job, saving every penny and spending nothing, since the early Miocene era, when the US was populated by terrifying hell-pigs called Daedon and parts of the UK were still under water to save up as much wealth as Elon Musk has amassed.

And Musk is not spending it on the local high street. His wealth is not trickling down into the community just as excess profits are not raising workers’ wages. How, then, to tackle such rampant inequality?

“There’s a massive gaping hole in the bottom of the boat. The wealth of governments and the middle class is rushing out at an enormous pace. We’ve got the world’s first trillionaire this week. I’ve been saying this the whole time, if we don’t do anything, it’s gonna be a return of the feudal age, where 10 kings of Europe own the whole fucking world and the rest of us live in shit. That’s what’s gonna happen.”

There is one major objection cited again and again in opposition to a wealth tax – or, some might argue, anything vaguely progressive or redistributive: it will spook the markets.

So what about those pesky markets, Gary? They brought down one radical government whose big economic idea they didn’t like. Will they really lettuce (geddit?) implement a wealth tax?

“So, the markets thing… to be honest, I think it is bad analysis. Spooking the markets? I’ve gotta be honest – and it’s not your fault, you’re an arts journalist, it’s not your area,” he says. Ouch – does an economics A-Level and two years of financial analysis at university count for nothing? Anyway, as you were…

“But how did Liz Truss spook the markets? By cutting taxes on the rich.

“Listen, the markets are not the disembodied spirit of Margaret Thatcher, you know? They’re not Ayn Rand come back to life. The markets are not inherently right-wing – the bond markets just want their money back.

“They want governments to be taxing at high enough levels and not spending too much. What I’m campaigning for is increasing taxes on the rich. This is what they want. It’s not going to spook them because then there will be enough income for the government to make sure they can pay their debts.

“This tax, if it’s well designed and implemented, improves the government’s financial situation. To be honest, I enjoy the debate. I’m enjoying watching these posh boys writhing in agony, developing horrific arguments about how taxes on the rich will spook the bond markets. Because it is just completely idiotic. Liz Truss cut taxes on the rich so there was less income. She worsened the government financial situation. The bond markets want taxes.”

Patriotic millionaire

As well as his YouTube channel and wealth tax activism, Stevenson is a member of pressure group Patriotic Millionaires UK. The group, led in the UK by Rebecca Gowland, began as an offshoot of a US group of wealthy people who want to pay more tax.

The name itself is provocative, with patriotism more often invoked by right-wing groups. But, as Stevenson explains, it works. “It’s patriotic not to want your fucking country to go to shit, you know?”

Stevenson returned to betting on the markets while studying for a Masters at Oxford University in 2017, after a few years out of the game. Does he do this to maintain his millionaire status?

“There are no checks on it,” he laughs. “Could I stay in Patriotic Millionaires if I lost my money on a terrible investment? I mean, I do still bet quite heavily on financial markets. So I guess if I get one wrong it could happen… but I haven’t got one wrong yet.

“Even though I stopped trading, I never stopped looking at the markets. And in 2017, I saw the markets were predicting an economic recovery that was not going to happen. I was in a boring economic lecture and wanted to show these guys who believe markets are all-knowing that they are frequently wrong, because they don’t understand the importance of inequality.

“I was trying to get my professors involved. I said, the markets are wrong, I’m gonna put a massive bet on that and make 30 or 40 grand, do you want in? But they didn’t.”

Stevenson’s disillusion with academia led directly to him trying to join the public conversation. When the pandemic hit, Stevenson predicted another disaster for living standards.

“I could see it was going to be horrific for inequality,” he says.

“So I did two things: the first was put a massive bet on the gold price. Then I wrote an article, which ended up on Open Democracy. My big trading restarted at the exact moment my public voice started.

“For me the two things are inseparable. I would not feel comfortable talking about the economy if I didn’t have my own money riding on it. I’m always literally putting my money where my mouth is.”

Stevenson needs a break, though. He’s knackered. And he’s been here before.

“I’ve had a burnout before and I’m not too far from a burnout now,” he says, before hopping on his bike to return home.

“I can feel it. I’m also just a person. The last few years have been insane and I have things I want to achieve in my life outside of work.

“But it’s hard to stop. If I can be shamelessly non-humble, I think we’ve had a massive impact. And we continue to have a massive impact. So I don’t want to stop, because me being in this fight gives us a much better chance of winning.”

Given his knack of predicting where the economy is heading, it’d be a brave move to bet against him… 

How To Get Filthy Rich (with Gary Stevenson) is on Channel 4 on 8 July at 9pm

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