Source: Radio New Zealand
New Zealand should be a rich country, but instead inequality is growing and the middle class are on the way out, British YouTuber, economist and trader Gary Stevenson says.
He told 30 with Guyon Espiner the divide between the middle class and the rich had been growing since 2011.
“I started to look at the financial situation of my friends and their families, and what I saw in 2011, was my parents’ generation, you know, ordinary people, not with exceptional jobs or degrees, owning property, buying houses,” Stevenson says.
“And then what I saw in my generation was kids with a degree, advanced education, who would never be able to own property. So what you’re seeing there is… families going from being property-owning families to non-property-owning families.”
Stevenson was a working-class kid from East London who used his smarts to win a trading game competition and score himself an internship with a leading bank. He went on to become one of the biggest traders in the world.
Now with 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube, Stevenson talks all things economics and told Guyon Espiner that New Zealand should be rich, in theory.
“You know, really, by rights, New Zealand should be a rich country, because there’s not a lot of people there, there’s a phenomenal amount of natural wealth per person, it can sustain a good quality of life for every single person in the country.
“The problem you have is, once you start cutting those taxes on the richest, the rich very, very quickly start to increase their share of the wealth, and inevitably that starts to squeeze people out.”
Gary Stevenson appearing via remote link on season 4 of ’30 with Guyon Espiner’. RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
Stevenson said the country would see “really rapid increases in poverty” if it did not tax the rich.
“I think if you don’t do anything, if you leave the system as it is, then wealth inequality will increase very rapidly.
“What that means is the rich get richer and richer, and everybody else loses their assets. What that means is ordinary families can’t afford to buy homes, ordinary families need to take enormous amounts of debt. It means the, the bankrupting of governments, which means the shutting down of welfare states.
“I’m here to speak to the New Zealand public and tell them the fire engines are not coming.”
He doubled down and said that if New Zealand wanted to “fix the economy”, the public needed to “demand action” from politicians and themselves.
“They don’t realise that if you don’t tax the rich, the rich will squeeze you out.
“If you accept a situation where the rich grow their share every year, then, of course, your share and your family’s share will eventually be squeezed to nothing,” he said.
When asked whether there needed to be some degree of international co-ordination, Stevenson said it would help massively.
“So I’ve got to be honest, I think this will be much, much, much easier if we work together.
“These problems, which you have [in New Zealand], unaffordable housing, not enough good jobs, not enough government services, we’re seeing them here, we’re seeing them everywhere. Let’s work together and fix this together.”
Stevenson is visiting Auckland in March next year with The People’s Economist tour.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
