Impose Wealth Tax To Ease Economic Crisis: Ex-Citibank Trader

Gary Stevenson, who made a pile as a Citibank trader when he bet against quick recovery after the 2008 financial crisis, has warned that widening income inequality will fuel recurrent economic disasters in a recent article of the New Statesman.

Photo Insert: Gary Stevenson made his fortune having bet against quick recovery after the 2008 financial crisis.

Stevenson made history by retiring at 27, the only trader to have done so in the history of global stock exchanges, and opted to study economics deeply to ease the pain inflicted by the members of the financial elite who control the destinies of 98% of the global population.

He says that this elite must pay up for being a major cause of the crises, and the wealth tax proposed by Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez to be levied on them ios a good starting point.

The former trader stressed in an essay published on April 7, 2020, that the winners in the pre-and post-pandemic economic crises are the rich.

“They accumulate cash during the crisis, buy assets for cheap in the immediate aftermath, and then they enjoy a huge appreciation in the prices of both their new assets and the ones they already owned,” he argued.

“The big losers are the people who fall through the cracks of the government support package: small business owners, the newly self-employed, and people between jobs. These are the people on the other side of the transaction when the rich buy assets at cut down prices – the people forced to sell out of desperation, Stevenson said. Worse, governments will be left with huge debts that 98% of the population must pay.

Other victims of the cyclical crises are young families who wanted to buy housing will also lose out, especially if they lose access to mortgages. They will be forced to rent while houses are bought by wealthy cash buyers. They will then have to save up a lot longer to buy an equivalent house as prices rocket.

“Wage earners will also lose out in the long term. Just like in the aftermath of 2008, sizable increases in house prices relative to wages would make housing unaffordable to working people unless they have family wealth to call upon. The current strategy will probably lead to a world where buying houses from one’s own wage income becomes increasingly an impossibility without family support,” Stevenson argued.

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