My name is Gary Stevenson i grew up around here  in East London from quite a poor family in quite  

a poor area but in 2008 when i was 21 i got a  job working for Citibank in canary wharf not far  

from here as an interest rate trader my job was to  bet whether interest rates would go up or go down  

now interest rates go up when the economy is strong and they come down when the economy is weak  

so basically my job is to bet on the strength of  the global economy now when i started working in  

2008 there was a global financial crisis and all  the rates in the whole world came down to zero  

so very quickly my job was to bet on when will  the rates recover which is basically a bet on when  

will the global economy recover now the history of  this is super interesting in 2008 governments and  

central banks all over the world printed a huge  amount of money and pushed it into the economy  

that meant that stock prices bounced super quickly  and economists and traders predicted that the  

economy would recover super quickly too so in  2008 they predicted a v-shaped recovery for 2009.  

now in 2009 that didn't happen that  prediction got pushed back to 2010.  

in 2010 it got pushed back to 2011. in 2011 it  got pushed back to 2012. in 2012 it was 2013 and  

back last year in 2020 they were still predicting a recovery for later that year and yet here we are in  

2021 with global interest rates just like  the global economy still at emergency lows  

now before i started working in the city i studied  economics and i became fascinated in understanding  

why are our predictions always wrong? why do  we always predict the economy is going to  

recover when it doesn't recover? when is the  economy going to recover? will it ever recover?  

and underlying those questions is  one big question why aren't people  

spending more money? now in 2008 when that huge  wave of new money got pushed into the economy  

economists thought people are going to  spend this money and that's going to cause  

a massive economic boom when that didn't  happen economists didn't understand why  

but for me having grown up around here in a place  like this i felt that i could understand why now  

if you print a huge amount of money it's important  where that money goes people like my family people  

like the people i grew up with people like  the people around here who would have spent  

that money if they got it weren't getting it  instead the money was going to people like  

the people i was working with in the city or even  the super rich people whose money we were moving  

now the problem is when money goes to the rich and  the super rich they don't spend it that means it  

doesn't boost the economy instead they use it to  buy stocks and houses that pushes stock prices and  

house prices up when that happens it doesn't help  ordinary people it makes it harder for ordinary  

people to save and it makes it harder for ordinary  people to buy houses that means if we print money  

but it only goes to the rich it doesn't make the  economy better in fact it makes the economy worse  

now i could see that if we didn't fix inequality  the global economy was not going to recover  

since economists and politicians weren't doing anything about it i could tell that the  

economy wasn't going to get better any time soon  i bet that the global economy would stay weak for  

years and that made me Citibank's most profitable  trader and that's how i became a millionaire  

because i knew the difference between the  economy down here and the economy over there

listen if we don't do anything about wealth  inequality the economy doesn't get better,  

housing doesn't become more affordable, wages  don't go up, well paid jobs don't become easy to get

all those things get worse, all those things  get more difficult, the economy for our kids  

will be worse than this economy and the  economy for their kids will be worse than that  

now i'm not just saying these things i'm betting  on them i've been betting on them for 13 years  

i've been right for 13 years and  i've made millions of pounds doing it  

but things don't have to turn out that way and  i don't want them to there is an alternative  

if we actually start reducing wealth inequality  rather than letting it continue to grow we can  

put that cycle into reverse we can make the money  go to ordinary people and make their lives better  

that will make ordinary people richer and not  only that but ordinary people are going to spend  

the money that's going to make the economy  stronger it's going to make the economy boom  

more jobs higher wages more opportunities the  opportunity to actually make money to get rich  

for ordinary people the chance to get good quality  housing the chance to have financial security to  

raise a family without having to worry just  about paying the mortgage or paying the bills  

these are the things that we could have if  we actually start reducing wealth inequality  

it's possible to do this at the moment we have  a tax system which is very efficient at taxing  

ordinary working people but very inefficient  attacks in the super rich often they end up paying  

extremely low rates attacks close to zero percent  but in the past we have had tax systems which make  

richer people pay more this was the case in the  50s and 60s here in Britain and the result was a  

booming economy with low unemployment good jobs  and affordable housing listen that was 60 or 70  

years ago if we were to bring in a progressive tax  system like that now the kind of economic boom we  

could have could be enormous and that could be  achieved using a wealth tax the idea behind the  

wealth tax is that billionaires and millionaires  should pay higher rates of tax than everybody  

else ordinary people will not be taxed more but  that money could be used to improve education  

to improve health care or to reduce the rates of  tax currently being paid by you and hard-working  

families it's finally been supported by prominent  economists and politicians all around the world  

and now it has a real chance of happening listen  i'm a millionaire and attacks on millionaires  

and billionaires is going to hit me too but  i can see what's going to happen if we don't  

fix a broken economic system it's going to get  worse and worse and it's not going to be pretty  

but a different future is possible we can have  affordable housing we can have good quality  

jobs but we can only have it if we fix wealth  inequality support the wealth tax i do

housing could be so much more affordable wages  could be so much higher and we could have so  

many more options in how we live our lives some  of them put a lot of money into paying economists  

and think tanks to tell you that inequality  is important for the economy that is not true