The Trading Game and Gary Stevenson

I just finished reading Gary Stevenson’s book The Trading Game 📚 and I wanted to offer some thoughts about the book.

I watched this interview with Gary on Novara Media:

and it’s what pushed me to buy the book. I thought that the book was going to be about economic theory. I expected it to explain how the economy works. It definitely was not that. Instead, it was a superb story about a young poor boy with a knack for numbers. He grows into a troubled teen who finds his way to the London School of Economics. Eventually, he becomes an adult from Ilford who achieves financial success as a trader with Citibank.

In my recent writing, I’ve talked a lot about reactive versus reflective people. From Stevenson’s book, I gathered that he is highly reflective. He has encountered many emotionally reactive people who don’t self-reflect. In the book he points out that people in the financial market are akin to most people in life. Many people don’t question the system. They just know that they exist in it. They’re trying to find financial safety, self-respect, or ego, but they never self-reflected on the why. They simply accept that they live inside it. They never think “hey maybe the system doesn’t work”, or “hey perhaps the system needs to be destroyed”, or “perhaps this system shouldn’t exist.” Most of the people in the book do not question the status quo.

If you’re in the market for a fast-paced, well-written look at the financial markets and the people inside them, it’s a great read.

The book and the interview had me thirsting for more from Gary. I’ve subscribed to his social media channels. He talks about politics and the economy. He explains what needs to happen and why it happens. He discusses the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Where Stevenson goes missing, is in the details of what needs to be done.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. How do we change that? The rich have all the resources. There are only a few levers that the poor can use to turn things around. Ultimately, there are three levers the poor have at their disposal:

• withholding their labor (through something like a general strike)

• severely limiting consumption

• 

The wealthy have all the other levers. They have all the material wealth to use against the working class. They also control politicians, police, the media, and the state to affect laws and policies.

It’s not just Gary, but the folks of “alternative media” like Owen Jones, Novara Media, etc. rarely allude to the first two levers, but especially the last one. If the imbalance of power continues, it is increasingly going to become a more common choice. More of a desperate choice. For a long time, society mostly kept these people at bay because those in power understood the need for balance. This balance involved government responsibility, the rich and the poor, and the working class and the one percent. There were barriers preventing them from extracting too much wealth. Those barriers are mostly gone now.

Stevenson’s analysis of what has happened, and what is happening is spot on. But much like his peers in the alternative media sphere, he speaks of these actors neutrally. He describes them in a very benign way. They are not cast as violent thugs or people acting knowingly and with purpose.

Billionaires should not exist. The existence of billionaires is violence. People who presently are billionaires should be taxed to the point that they are not billionaires. It is unethical to extract wealth in such a reverse Robin Hood manner. That shouldn’t exist, and the framework that allows that to happen shouldn’t exist either. But it does.

One major aspect of the war in Gaza (or Ukraine, or Iraq, etc.) was that most people wanted it to end. Many people support Israel’s right to exist, but most were not cheering for this conflict to continue. But it did because the wealthy wanted to enrich themselves, and they continue to enrich themselves, regardless of public perception. The situation in Gaza continues to unfold in public. The truth has been revealed. There is no pretense of international law or rules-based order. The rules have been revealed for what they truly are. There are laws for friends and laws for enemies. How many times do we need to watch this play out? Protesting doesn’t work. Voting doesn’t work. At the end of the day, how do you change things if those don’t work? That’s the question that can’t be asked directly. If asked, it must be posed gently to avoid alerting or upsetting the rulers.

The revolution will not be televised. But it won’t be had by gently asking those with their boots on our necks to stop, either.