Gary Stevenson's Wealth Tax: The Missing Manifesto
A Citi trader spent his twenties betting against the economy he grew up in and won. Now he's on the BBC arguing Britain needs a wealth tax. The bit of his case that doesn't land.
UK net wealth distribution by household decile
Source: ONS Wealth and Assets Survey. The bottom half own roughly 5% of UK net wealth.
Key takeaways
Gary Stevenson is a former Citibank FX trader from East London who now runs the GarysEconomics YouTube channel and argues that inequality is the defining economic problem of our generation.
His core claim is that working-age households are losing wealth to a small asset-owning class, and that without a wealth tax this divergence will accelerate into a permanent rentier economy.
We agree with the diagnosis. The data on UK wealth concentration backs him up and the political class has avoided the question for decades.
Stevenson's stated position is that his job is to shift public opinion and leave the legislative detail to politicians - a defensible division of labour for an economist. Our reservation is narrower: the campaign would still land harder paired with at least one worked manifesto somewhere in the wealth tax movement, even if it doesn't come from Stevenson himself.