Blood on the trading floor: The Trading Game by Gary Stevenson

The Trading Game: A Confession by Gary Stevenson

Published in paperback by Penguin Books 2025

Book Review by Yasmin Fitzpatrick.

Do you keep an eye on what is moving off the bookshelves in your local bookshop, or WH Smith?  If not, you may not have noticed that Gary Stevenson has been at the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list for 11 weeks.  You may not be one of 906K #garyseconomics Instafollowers, or among the 1.2 million YouTube subscribers. Stevenson knows something that he thinks will alleviate our current economic crisis, so I wanted to find out more.

Thinking about economics can be initially unappealing, as it seems chaotic out there. Western governments have borrowed so much money that lending institutions are losing faith in their historic, cast-iron guaranteed capacity to manage the repayments. The USA - the most significant market, the wealthiest country in the world, also has the most prominent borrowing blues: the government is using trade tariffs on imports to reduce taxes, fund government spending AND reduce the trade deficit with just about every other country.  This is sending the markets into a whirling vortex of volatility. What on earth is to be done? 

At the same time, most of us share a sneaking suspicion that THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING. The world’s biggest economists failed to predict the US subprime mortgage crisis, the ensuing 1987 stock market crash, the 2009 European debt crisis and ensuing Greek sovereign debt crisis, the 2011 stock market crash, right up to today’s economic problèmes du jour. All good reasons to doubt any proffered answer to pressing matters like say, house prices, employment, or a future that offers young people a place in it.   So…. how come the Sunday Times Number One bestseller is the true story of a millionaire former city trader who thinks he has found a solution to the economic crisis?

The Trading Game starts out as a witty page-turner and ends by explaining why Gary Stevenson, former Master of the Universe at Citibank, wants to heal the economy. Stevenson deploys a familiar story arc to great effect: a picaresque journey and meteoric ascent, from working class beginnings in an ordinary East London family, to a place of untold riches, where he becomes the most successful, most profitable FX trader in Citibank among the glass and steel skyscrapers of Canary Wharf and beyond.

The early part of his book is a breathless account of how, despite an unpromising school career, ingénu Stevenson uses his maths skills to secure a place at the LSE, followed by a placement at Citibank, which he wins by beating all the other economics undergrads in a tense series of card-based trading competitions.

The reader then accompanies Stevenson on his epic voyage into the world of finance and foreign exchange swaps, told with an eye to readers who have always wondered what on earth City Boys actually DO. Cruel but generally affectionate caricatures of finance bros follow - The Slug, The Frog, Bushead - Stevenson describes his fellow traders as ‘dysfunctional maths geniuses, overfed public school boys and borderline psychopaths’, men with the kind of toxic, socially inadequate personality traits you’d like to think were exaggerated. We have no way of knowing, but Stevenson deploys his living caricatures to comic effect.  And it is an extraordinarily male environment – the only women who feature briefly are a cold-blooded HR Manager, a female broker whose designer handbag is used as a sick bag on a top night out, several long-suffering girlfriends and the occasional backgrounded wife.  Stevenson’s scabrous stories of the high-rolling, high-stakes world of the trading floor make for richly comic storylines, told with a non-judgmental glee.

Stevenson becomes a FX trader, buying and selling currencies on the global foreign exchange market, the largest financial market in the world, where profits are made from changes in exchange rates. Starting in 2007, he provides us with a trading-floor-eye view of the subprime mortgage crisis, the 2008 stock market crash, and the ensuing economic recession. When the dust settles, Lehman Brothers is the only investment bank that goes to the wall, as systemic collapse is prevented by the injection into the banking system of trillions of dollars and billions of sterling and Euros of government funding, supplied by the taxpayer. 

‘The imminent bankruptcy of our own employer was of no concern to anyone. We all knew that we’d get bailed out.

‘What are they gonna do?’ they’d all joke to each other. ‘Send the guys with brown overalls in to run this whole thing?’

And then we’d all laugh and we’d make loads of money.’

Stevenson’s money-making skills reach stratospheric heights following the 2008 crash, when he makes huge trades in the expectation that the economy will continue to slump, at a time when all others operated on widely held expectations of economic recovery. Why? Stevenson notices that the value of assets continues to rise, while the cost of borrowing declines, against all expectations and the rules of economics.  His blunt prose conveys a discomfort at profiting so richly from economic recession and the suffering that ensues:

‘You’re making a killing betting on millions of people becoming poorer – like the very people you grew up with.’

Stevenson’s own working class background fuels his resentment of more privileged trading peers, who appear to know nothing of the ‘real world’ most people inhabit. The antics on and off the trading floor are jaw-droppers, peppered with light-touch guides to how currency traders make money. But the reader’s deeper engagement is with Stevenson’s personal struggles: his desire to make more money than the other traders, the personal and moral conflicts he encounters, and finally the sheer psychological toll financial trading takes on both himself and many of those around him on the trading floor.  The section ends with him wanting out.

Stevenson’s relives his slow breakdown and surreal attempts to resign from his Citibank employers, who block his exit, along with the millions of pounds he has earned in commission.  In the final section of his book, Stevenson sets out his nascent thoughts on inequality.  After all, it was his observation of the real-world effects of growing inequality in 2011 that led him to his most profitable – and alarming – realisation: that wealth accumulating in the hands of the very wealthy increases in expenditure on property, stocks and shares and other assets, but does NOT increase consumer spend, and will therefore fail to revive economic growth.  He bet against economic recovery because he saw no signs of increased spending in working class communities like his own family and friends in Ilford, despite low interest rates and the Bank of England printing more money (quantitative easing), actions which economists were sure would save the day. They were wrong: G20 stimulus packages and IMF interventions were needed to stabilise the global markets.  Under Brown’s Labour Government, the pound was devalued by 20%, VAT was reduced, public spending was increased, government borrowing rose, unemployment rose, and redundancies surged 160% as household expenditure fell.  Austerity measures were swiftly implemented by the Conservative Lib-Dem government that followed the 2010 election.  This caused the 2011-12 ‘double dip’ recession, and a further drop in GDP.   By 2018, real earnings were 3% lower than in 2008 and arguments got louder among economists about the effect of austerity politics, many blaming Osborne for long-term damage to the UK economy.  It cost the UK taxpayer billions of pounds to stabilise and restore confidence in the financial system, but confidence in the economy remains low to this day.

Stevenson maintains that growing economic inequality prevented the predicted 2011 ‘bounce back’ from occurring.  He also argues that the same economic inequality has continued to keep the UK economy in a state of slump.   Cheap loans with low interest rates, made available in the hope of economic regeneration, ultimately benefited the wealthy, who purchased more assets and drove up house prices. This served to enrich those who already had assets – property, bonds, stocks, and savings.  Instead of trickle-down, low interest rates, combined with the growing wealth gap, made mortgages and rents more expensive, increasing the financial burden on the squeezed middle class and the excluded working class.  As a result, less money circulated in the real economy, perpetuating low consumer demand and weak economic growth, causing the economy to shrink further. 

Stevenson is not alone in blaming the wealth gap for our current economic woes.  Economist Thomas Piketty, Nobel Laureate economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, and economist and UN Advisor Jayati Ghosh have all identified growing inequality and the concentration of wealth in an ever-smaller number of hands as the source of negative economic growth. In brief, they all argue that high inequality – the wealth gap between the working and middle classes on the one hand and the super-wealthy on the other - shrinks consumer demand and with it the economy. Wealth then increases primarily among the small, high-saving, wealthy elites. Social and political unrest intensifies as the widening wealth gap fuels distrust. Democratic institutions fail to deliver, and good governance declines, as the very rich wield increasingly disproportionate political influence.  Wealth systematically bypasses large swathes of society, and poverty becomes entrenched, as consumer demand, needed to boost the economy through spending on goods and services, rather than on savings and investments, is stifled.  Meanwhile, the stock market boom that lasted until the beginning of 2025 is seen as having effectively masked the collapse in consumer spending and the businesses that relied on it.  The stock market is not booming now.

We now seem to be living through a simultaneous collapse in consumer spending coupled with a collapse in stock market prices.  This is explained away as a temporary response to temporary Trumponomics rather than a ‘market correction’ - or worse.  Time will tell.  New political parties gain popularity as the old parties consistently fail to deliver on promises of economic growth and social stability, and seem unable to connect with their electorate. The economists of inequality will point to all this as further proof of their predictions coming true.

The story does not stop where the novel ends. Having studied for an MPhil in economics at Oxford in 2020, Stevenson now runs a YouTube channel GarysEconomics, where he tries to bring economics to a wider audience and campaigns against economic inequality.  He is currently asking his followers to join him in demanding that the Labour Party introduce a new tax on the super wealthy, not just on their incomes, but on their wealth itself.  This, the argument goes, will help reduce economic inequality while simultaneously finding new money to increase the government's coffers. Surplus gained from a wealth tax could be used to reduce income tax for other socio-economic groups, increase government spending, and thereby stimulate consumer spending, business investment, and innovation, thus fueling much-needed economic growth.

If you watch his channel, you may regard Stevenson’s self-assuredness and downbeat dress style as verging on the performative and somewhat off-putting, but there is no doubt that he sees himself as on a crusade against growing inequality; he wants you to join.  For now, the solution proffered is national rather than international and in the hands of the UK government. 

Would a UK wealth tax on the super-wealthy oil the wheels of economic recovery? Or would it prove an irrelevance, a convoluted dead end? That’s not a topic for this review, but it deserves attention, analysis and proper debate.  Stevenson’s argument that we should all be more knowledgeable about economic theory and practice is a good one.  It is too important to be left to the economists.