Gary Stevenson entered the London trading floor of Citibank as a 21-year-old boy in the summer of 2008, weeks before the implosion of the global economy. He left it in 2012 as Citibank’s most profitable foreign-exchange trader, having made millions from betting billions on the long aftershock of the Great Recession. He went from living with his parents in Ilford, “in the shadows of east London’s skyscrapers”, to living as a millionaire in a marina. As a boy he would watch the train his father took to work as a postman pass by his bedroom window, catching a glimpse of a man on his way to earn £20,000 a year for a family of five. In his second year at Citibank, Stevenson was paid a bonus equal to 20 times his father’s salary. In his fourth year his bonus was £2.4m.
Stevenson made his fortune by betting that austerity would be far more damaging that most people expected. Developed economies, he realised in early 2011, were not going to recover. Interest rates were not going to rise, as economists predicted. The poor were going to stay poor and the wealthy would thrive. “JB, you don’t get it do you?” he said in 2012 to a fellow trader who had mentored him in his early days at the bank. “The asset holders never lose. The rich never lose.”
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