If you are a social media user, it’s pretty hard to avoid the face and voice of Gary Stevenson right now. Garys Economics is an online machine, amassing millions of subscribers across his many media channels. His gospel has obvious appeal to those on the left feeling frustrated with declining levels of opportunities in Britain. However, the online right’s interaction with him (or rather lack of it) is just as interesting. Does the right still care about market economics?
Gary is a former Citibank short-term interest rate trader. His Sunday Times best-seller tells the story of being a brilliantly gifted man who had taken on the capitalists at their own game, rose to being one of the biggest traders in the world, became disgusted with the enormous wealth it brought him, and now seeks to dismantle the whole awfully unfair system — an account that has struck a chord with his acolytes. In his cultivated image of hoodie and jeans, a man purportedly richer than Croesus now stands humbly garbed in the attire of a lowly street urchin. He wishes to lead his disciples towards a paradise of increased tax receipts for the UK treasury. Wealth and its trappings being abhorrent to him, his Patreon is priced at a saintly £5 a month.
Of course, as with other men in his position, there have been Doubting Thomases, including some of his former co-workers, peers and superiors who have suggested that he may not have bestridden the financial universe to quite the extent claimed. But Stevenson has largely ignored critics and remained focussed on higher ideals — and to some extent I think that we should, too.
Many of Stevenson’s high-flying peers from the world of finance, such as Pershing Square’s Bill Ackman, Carlyle Group’s David Rubenstein and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, have committed to The Giving Pledge: a charitable campaign, founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, to encourage wealthy people to contribute a majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. This is a laudable and tax efficient commitment, and it can be embraced by those on both the left and the right. Many of the signatories signal their intent to fund environmental campaigns and the fight against urban poverty — issues often co-opted by left wing campaigners — whilst the ethos of doing well to be able to do good, as a counter to accusations of base avarice, appeals to the classical liberal right.
However, for Gary this is not enough. Campaigning for Millionaires for Humanity, and speaking as a member of the super rich community, he urges the taxman to take those decisions out of the hands of millionaires and billionaires and to seize and redistribute their gains from a rigged and corrupt system for those deemed more deserving. This is where things get complicated, tribal and left versus right.
Most people see just another celebrity demanding the state seize from others
This is also where it becomes tempting to draw parallels with another saint who walked with kings without losing the common touch. One who, having lived in the opulence and splendour reserved for only the very elite, rejected it all for the quiet life of online media and television. For much like Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, very little of what Gary Stevenson has to say is particularly novel or interesting, taken on its own merits. Instead, it requires you to buy into the story of his truth and his lived experience to give it life. Netflix would not have commissioned Meghan to teach viewers how to make strawberry jam on her new show were it not for her marriage into England’s hereditary monarchy. Without the story of being “the best fucking trader in the fucking world”, Gary would just be another talking head on the fringes of the post-Corbynite Labour Party events circuit.
It goes without saying that opposition to wealth aggregating to a centralised few is as old as cavemen, and in every instance of transactional markets, the speculator has not been far from ire. In one of the more famous examples, during the reign of Diocletian, speculators became unpopular through accusations of hoarding provisions, aiming to profit as demand increased. They were blamed for the inflation headaches of the Tetrarchy and compared to Barbarian hordes attacking the city of Rome. In response, Diocletian issued the Edict on Maximum Prices — imposing a ceiling on the prices of thousands of items including beef, grain, wine, shoes and even sausages, with the death penalty for profiteers and speculators. Somewhat predictably, per the writer Lactantius: “Then much blood was shed over trifling and cheap articles; through fear, wares were withheld from market, and the rise in prices became much worse, until after the death of many men the law was through very necessity rescinded.”
Even the more modern thrust of Garyism is a rehashing of criticisms of so-called financialization of the economy brought to the mainstream by Yanis Varoufakis, Greek Minister of Finance and battler of sovereign debt market vigilantism during the European government bond crisis. In the fall-out from the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent enlarged role taken by central banks in providing support to financial market stability through quantitative easing programmes (though dubbed invariably by Gary Stevenson as simple “money printing”), Varoufakis saw financial institutions as turning their focus away from supporting value created through labour and production and instead turning to when he dubs “cloud capital” and rents. This is of course something that those on the right were equally happy to engage with, in a way they have not been with Stevenson, for many of these market distortions chime with free market gripes about the role of the state in market pricing and allowing bad institutions to fail.
The right is not reluctant to engage with Gary Stevenson because he is new and dangerous but because he is unoriginal and bland. Of course, the fact that these issues have been wrestled with before doesn’t excuse the lack of engagement with Stevenson on The Issues — just because something is old, it doesn’t mean that it is not important or should not continue to be litigated. Wealth generation, those benefiting from the proceeds of wealth, its distribution and what it means for a happy and healthy society are absolutely issues that the right should and does engage with. But, to return to Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, if you want the recipe for a Quiche Lorraine rather than an hour of storytelling about what eggs and shortcrust pastry mean in the context of the baker’s lived experience, you’re going to look to Larousse Gastronomique rather than sit through 60 minutes of Meghan, With Love.
When you strip it all away, choose the substance over the personality and ignore the carefully managed online image of wealth and success, then most people see just another celebrity amongst many demanding the state seize from others to give to their cause. As market watchers, from Diocletian’s sausage speculators to hedge fund traders living in the enormous shadow of Gary Stevenson know, when the market’s flooded and supply is forecast to remain high, new investors are hard to find.
