Gary’s Economic Message for Australia

Ahead of his Australian tour in a few weeks, Gary Stevenson joins The Last Place on Earth to discuss his origin story betting on civilisational collapse, his theory of political change and why he wants to give Australians a kick up the arse.

The burden of being the prophet of inequality can sit heavy for Gary Stevenson. He freely admits he is one of the world’s foremost economic influencers, but sometimes he feels the need to sit back and take a deep breath.

“All of the money I've ever made on trading has been betting on on basically civilizational collapse,” he tells me in the course of an hour-long conversation from his home in London, close to the soaring skyscrapers of Canary Wharf where he made millions on the trading floor - but close also to where he grew up, a working class boy in the East End who was once expelled from school for drug dealing. 

He recounts a conversation with a junior Australia trader about their role in the face of economic collapse. “Do you think we should do something about it?” he asked him. “We already have,” comes the reply, “we’ve placed the trade.”

“I’m not talking about the fucking trade,” Gary recalls telling him. “I’m talking about the fucking economy collapsing! And I remember the genuine confusion on his face.”

Gary quit the trading floor in 2014 (he still trades in his spare time). For a while he went back to university, but he found the Oxford dons even more out of touch than the posh City boy traders, and for similar reasons.

“If you're to be an economics professor rather than a trader, you've turned down millions of pounds so that you can be a wanker in Oxford. You'd have to be posh to make that stupid choice, right?”

Gary displays a fairly jaundiced perspective on the decision-makers, which is less a product of the system itself than the individuals who are pulling the levers.

“Basically we're being run by a bunch of posh idiots…All I've witnessed in my entire time is everybody be wrong about everything all of the time.”

He decided to do something about it. For a while at the start of the pandemic he wrote pieces for print media, but he grew disillusioned with the reach and requirements of the mainstream press.

“I talked to my mates, but what I realized was my mates were shitting themselves about this economic crisis, and they weren't going to the Guardian. They were going to YouTube.”

And so he followed them, setting up Gary’s Economics as a Youtube channel out of his kitchen in 2020. It’s gone pretty well, with more than one and a half million subscribers and another million followers on Instagram.

Now for the first time he’s bringing that message overseas, and he’s chosen Australia and New Zealand for the first international tour for ‘The People’s Economist’.

“I want to give them a kick up the arse and say, ‘Don't let it go. Because Australia had a good thing going and you're losing it. You're losing it to the billionaires just like we are.” 

“If you allow them to take all of the profits from the oil and gas and from all the natural resources, they will use those profits to buy your fucking houses, that is what will happen. That is what will happen. You know, you need to protect your share of the resources for economic reasons, but also just for power distribution reasons.”

“Australia has done a good job historically of protecting its majority and having a relatively egalitarian society that is being lost now. And if you lose a lot of bad things can happen. But most obviously, the thing that you will see is loss of affordability of housing, and that is because you are competing with the billionaires for ownership of assets.”

“And if you allow them to get richer and richer, the most obvious consequence is that house prices will go up and housing will become unaffordable.”

“Don't drive yourself mad, you know, because we're going not going to win this tomorrow. But get involved - with political groups, you know, support my YouTube channel, share it with your friends and family.”

“I’m looking forward to sharing that with Australians.”

Tickets for Gary’s Australian shows are available here.

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