How one man survived the crazy world of big-city banking

Lifestyle

by larry getlen

In 2011, just six years after beginning his education at the London School of Economics, Gary Stevenson was one of the world's most prominent currency traders, earning $35 million at Citibank and a $2.5 million bonus of his own. was obtained.

But Stevenson, a working-class young man from east London who had once been expelled from high school for selling cannabis, had a natural talent for mathematics but struggled to adapt to the stress of work. Ta. Especially when he realized he was in debt. He succeeded in resolving the kind of economic inequality that was harming many in his old neighborhood.

As he writes in his new memoir, The Trading Game: A Confession (Crown Currency, on sale now), even with all this cash, he rapidly lost weight and became a hole-in-the-wall. I lived in an apartment wearing old shoes. without furniture.

“I'm not sure I knew I had a problem,” Stevenson wrote. “There was a time when I thought maybe it wasn't normal to be pathologically unable to afford a sofa, or indeed any home furnishings. But I allowed that moment to pass. There were other pressing issues, such as interest rates.

He soon decided to quit and then his life became very strange.

Mr. Stevenson wrote that Citibank set his bonus to be paid over five years, meaning that if he left, he would forfeit any money he had not yet received.

His life became a battle of wits and wills with Citibank. When he applied for a sabbatical, his application was not only denied, but Stephenson was forced to relocate to Tokyo to work for a trader named Caleb, who had helped recruit him at economics school. .

Caleb briefly left the bank a few years ago, but he kept his bonuses because of a provision that allows employees to receive bonuses if they work for charity. But even though Mr. Stevenson was prepared to work for a charity fighting wealth inequality, Citibank still rejected his request to leave.

Then, he writes, the day came when Caleb took him out to dinner and gave him an ultimatum.

Stevenson is shocked, but Caleb tells him the story of a talented young trader who was about to quit Deutsche Bank. The bank didn't want him to quit, so they made his life hell, dragging him into lawsuit after lawsuit until he went bankrupt.

“I think you're a good person,” Stevenson quoted Caleb ominously warning. “But sometimes bad things happen to good people. You learn that. We can make your life very difficult.”

The stress caused Stevenson to have a mental breakdown, and doctors ordered him to take three months off, followed by another month. If he had scored the third goal, he would have been stripped of his bonus.

Citibank then assigned him to an administrative office with no real work. The dimly lit office is what he describes as “the room you wait in when you're about to go to hell and there's some sort of administrative delay.”

His hiring was a cat-and-mouse game, with each side nudging the other to see who would contribute first. During that time, Stevenson kept himself busy doing almost nothing every day. Except that I was starting to get more and more crazy.

“I came around 10 a.m. and started studying and drawing,” Stevenson wrote. “Sometimes I would get documents from my lawyer and print them out on a nearby printer. I would go to lunch around 12 o'clock and then go straight home.”

He felt his mental state fading and he began to fear that he would be stuck in this purgatory for the rest of his life.

“What happens if I can't get out?” he writes. “What shall I do? Shall I sue the bank? . . . What will I become?”

He started emailing everyone he thought could make a difference, from the company's global head of human resources to the CEO.

And just like that, it was over.

Stevenson didn't give any details other than to say he won – it's safe to assume he was sworn to secrecy.

After a meeting with human resources, Mr. Stevenson and his funds left Citibank and the trading industry, never to return.

He has since earned a master's degree from Oxford and started a YouTube channel called Gary's Economy, where he teaches real-world economic principles, including how economic inequality affects us all.

Looking back on his life at the bank, he now understands that the traders with whom he made millions of dollars are no different from the drug dealers he dealt with in high school.

“What I realized in that moment is that we are all the same. The only difference is how wealthy our fathers were,” Stevenson wrote.

“If those drug dealers went to Eton, they'd be on the trading floor with me. And if those traders were born in East London, where I was born, they'd be there too. We're all the same.''