In 2011, only six years after starting his education at the London School of Economics, Gary Stevenson was one of the world’s most prominent currency traders, making $35 million for Citibank and earning himself a $2.5 million bonus.
But Stevenson — a working-class lad from East London who’d once been expelled from high school for selling cannabis but had a natural talent for math — was not adapting well to the stress of the job, especially when he realized that he owed his success to the kind of financial inequality that was harming many in his old neighborhood.
As he writes in his new memoir, “The Trading Game: A Confession,” (Crown Currency, out now), despite all that cash, he was losing weight at a rapid pace, wearing shoes with holes in them and living in a flat with no furniture.
“I’m not sure I knew I had a problem,” Stevenson writes. “There was a point where it had occurred to me that it was probably not normal to be pathologically unable to buy sofas, or, in fact, any item of household furniture. But I allowed that moment to pass. There were other pressing issues at hand, like interest rates.”
He soon made the decision to quit, and that’s when his life got super weird.
Stevenson writes that Citibank structured his bonus to be paid out over five years, so that if he left, he would forfeit the amount he hadn’t yet received.
His life became a battle of wits and wills against Citibank. When he requested a sabbatical, not only was the request denied, Stevenson was forcibly transferred to Tokyo to work with a trader named Caleb, the man who had helped recruit him at the economics school.
Caleb temporarily left the bank years earlier, but kept his bonus due to a rule that employees could do so if they worked for a charity. But as Stevenson made arrangements to work for a charity dedicated to combatting wealth inequality, Citibank still denied his request to leave.
Then, he writes, came the day that Caleb took him out for a meal and an ultimatum.
To Stevenson’s shock, Caleb told him about a talented young trader who tried to leave Deutsche Bank. The bank didn’t want him to leave, so they made his life hell, dragging him through lawsuit after lawsuit until he went bankrupt.
“I think you’re a good person,” Stevenson quotes Caleb as warning ominously. “But sometimes, bad things happen to good people. You are going to learn that. We can make life very difficult for you.”
The stress had destroyed Stevenson to the point where a doctor ordered a three-month rest, then another. Had he taken a third, he would have forfeited his bonus.
Citibank then assigned him to an administrative office where he had no actual work to do, in a dimly lit office he describes as “the room you wait in when you’re going to hell but there’s some sort of administrative delay.”
His employment had turned into a game of cat and mouse, with each side prodding the other to see who would give first. All the while, Stevenson was busy doing, well, almost nothing each day — except for increasingly going crazy.
“I would come in at about 10 a.m. and start studying or drawing,” Stevenson writes. “Sometimes I would have paperwork from my lawyers, which I would print on the printers that were conveniently nearby. At about 12 I would go and get lunch, and then I’d go straight home.”
He felt his mental state slipping away, and began to fear that he’d be stuck in this purgatory for the rest of his life.
“What would it mean if I couldn’t get out?” he writes. “What would I do? Would I sue the bank? . . . What would I become?”
He began emailing anyone who might be able to move the needle, from the company’s global head of HR to its CEO.
And then, just like that, it was over.
Stevenson doesn’t reveal the details — it seems safe to assume he was sworn to confidentiality — other than to reveal that he won. After a meeting with HR, Stevenson and his money left Citibank and the trading life, never to return.
He has since earned a master’s degree from Oxford and started a YouTube channel called Gary’s Economics, where he teaches real-world economic principles including how economic inequality affects us all.
Thinking back to his life at the bank, he now understands that the traders he earned millions of dollars with were no different than the drug dealers he had dealt with in high school.
“What I realized then, at that moment, is that we are all the same. The only difference is how rich our dads were,” Stevenson writes.
“If those drug dealers went to Eton, they would be there, with me, on the trading floor. And if those traders were born where I was born, in East London, then they’d be there too, selling drugs on the corner. We are all the same.”
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