Coming to Grips with Inequality

When you grow up with as little as Gary Stevenson (b. 1986) did, you have to claw to get ahead in life. Given the rules in advance to something called The Trading Game, he leveraged the chance to participate in the competition and destroyed his fellow participants, winning a plum internship at Citibank. Stevenson bares his soul in this memoir – nay, “confession” – named for the event, and best about him is his delivery of the unvarnished truth, that without the blessing of this opportunity he easily could’ve ended up dealing drugs on the streets of East London, an infraction for which he’d been booted from school. “My dad worked for the Post Office,” he writes, comparing his lot to the sons of privilege in his midst. “You take your breaks where you can get them, I guess.” Like any true hustler, Stevenson quickly learned to evaluate opponents, employ simple arbitrage, bluff, and intimate through what he terms aggressive loudness (hilarious to imagine what that must’ve sounded like). Part sponge, part gopher, Stevenson became a near-immediate sensation, raking in mid-six-figure bonuses by his early 20’s. His life was a huge cake filled with rainbows and smiles, until it wasn’t.

In the classic careful-what-you-wish-for fashion, our hero’s success had to come at someone’s expense, namely the working class and poor. As the Great Recession took hold and central banks the world over dropped interest rates to 0% if not – yikes – into negative territory, the widespread belief was they’d tick back upward in short order. Such interest-rate management had worked the prior two decades and economists were certain continued manipulation would once again help achieve sustained growth. Endless currency was printed, got loaned out super cheap, and bankers awaited the reversal that did not arrive. “The best trading, you do it with your nose,” we learn. “It smells like stupidity.” And therein lies one of our key takeaways: great traders like Stevenson make money when so-called experts are wrong, and he became a self-made millionaire before life’s quarter-century mark by capitalizing on this discovery. That the rich get the assets, the poor get the debt, and the middle class gets eliminated weighs so heavily on him that he begins a descent into madness.

We hate that the author had such profound struggles except that it’s what makes for such a wild story. He buys a nice flat he can comfortably afford only to gut it and leave the floors unfinished. He could’ve appointed a renovated home with lovely furniture yet leaves it bare, finally consenting to a used sofa arranged by his girlfriend (whom he calls Wizard, one of many memorable pseudonyms used to protect the innocent and quite guilty). Stevenson was spending none of his new-found fortune, was miserable and depressed, but rather than quit he fought Citibank tooth & nail for his suppressed bonuses. We come to realize you can take the boy off the streets, but you can’t take the streets out of the boy. The more the author is threatened and mistreated, the tighter the golden handcuffs are cinched, the harder he digs in for battle. “I ain’t here for lessons,” he assures us. “I protect myself.” No spoilers but allow me to say the Postscript is the stuff of Hollywood. Bet Michael Lewis is kicking himself. Rather than following the since incarcerated felon Sam Bankman-Fried around for two years, he could’ve been profiling the admirable Gary Stevenson.

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