Gary Stevenson is young, angry and everywhere – but the veracity of his anti-capitalist rhetoric is less important than why it’s finding such an eager audience, says Eliza Filby

You may have seen his turn on Question Time, or his two-and-a-half-hour appearance on The Diary of a CEO – watched by over 3m people. Perhaps you’ve read his book The Trading Game, currently top of the bestseller list. Gary Stevenson is a former Citibank trader turned anti-capitalist campaigner. He’s young, angry and everywhere.

He’s becoming a new kind of public intellectual for disillusioned millennials and Gen Z, who arguably never had much faith in the system. They’ve only ever known stagnating wages, student debt and successive crises. What’s going viral with young people these days isn’t 5am routines or Bitcoin – it’s economic despair.

There’s no doubt Stevenson’s story is extraordinary. A working-class boy from Ilford and a maths genius, he graduated from LSE to become, in his words, Citibank’s “best trader”. He made millions betting on the economy in the aftermath of the 2008 crash. But then he walked away, after realising what his trades were really doing: making the rich richer, the poor poorer. Now, he’s on a mission to expose what he claims is the con of capitalism. His message........

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