Man who made first million at 24 reveals moment he won £28 million bet on 'society collapsing'
A former London trader has revealed the moment he won a $35 million (£27.9 million) bet that he made on 'society collapsing'.
Gary Stevenson made his first million quid back when he was just 24 years old. He did this betting on the outcome of Greece's then financial crisis back in 2011.
Now, sitting down with LADbible TV for the latest episode of Minutes With, the Londoner revealed his extraordinary life so far that has revolved around making lots and lots of money. That's for himself and his employers, earning him the reputation of being the best trader in all of London.
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After retiring from City trading back in 2014 - just six years after starting on that journey - he now focuses on economic campaigning against inequality, even calling for the introduction of a wealth tax that could directly take more money from his pockets.
"I was making loads of money from the fact that the world economy is going to be f*cked for ever. I rolled it around in my head for a year or two, before deciding I had to quit," he told the Guardian three years ago.
Now, in the latest Minutes With episode, Stevenson speaks about the exact moment he won a $35 million bet off of the back of global financial misery.
At the time, Stevenson had landed a full-time job at Citibank, a huge financial services company and the fourth largest bank in the United States.
And before making the huge bet, he was contemplating that he might lose his job after having lost $5 million in trading during the week.
"And then I got called into a meeting early 2011 with one of Citibank's top economists. And he went through the financial situation of a lot of the world's governments. So I don't know if you remember, in 2011, there was this big crisis with the governments of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ireland," Stevenson said.
"This is before that kicked off. And it was [about] all of these governments going massively into debt. Every year, they're spending more than they can make. They having to sell off their assets, their debts are exploding.
"You know, including the governments of the UK, the US, Japan, these are the biggest governments in the world. And I come out of that meeting, and I was like - 'How can it be that my friends are losing their houses and going into debt?'.
"Their families are doing that. The world's governments are losing their assets and going into debt. Where are the assets going? Who is the debt to? It's not possible. We can't all go into debt. Somebody has to be on the other side of that.
"We can't all lose our assets, somebody has to be getting the assets.
"And I was sitting there. I used to have to take the sandwiches to that meeting. So I'd had all these sandwiches around me sitting on the desk coming out of this meeting, where you realise, all of the governments in the world are totally f**ked, basically.
"And you look around, and you're surrounded by these, like, fat millionaires in pink shirts, and you realise - 'It's us, isn't it? We are, we are the guys who are accumulating...'.
"I myself was on the verge of becoming a millionaire at that point. You know what I mean? You realise - 'This is it. We are accumulating the assets from the middle class, from the government'.
"And then you realise it's not gonna get better, because if the middle class families can't afford to pay the bills when they own their own house, or their kids definitely won't when they don't own their own houses, if governments can't run a balanced budget when they're not massively in debt, well, they definitely can't when they are massively in debt.
"And what I saw in that moment was it was gonna spiral, it's gonna get worse and worse and worse. That wealth would continue to be sucked out of the middle class and towards the rich. And I realised straight away, that there would never be an economic recovery.
"And I put this massive bet on... I was an interest rates trader. So my specific bet was that interest rates would stay zero for, like, three years. Everybody thought interest rates were gonna come up really quickly.
"And that bet was super-successful, basically. And I made $35 million for the bank, and I got paid $1 million myself, basically on the back of this bet that the global economy would collapse, and that society would collapse. Suddenly I was a multimillionaire surrounded by multimillionaires."
Tom Earnshaw