Super rich should pay higher taxes to fix this crisis

ON Monday, 83 millionaires – myself included – signed an open letter calling on governments to raise taxes on people like me. I wasn’t born rich. I know poverty and I know crisis. I grew up in Ilford, East London, next to the railway.

- Gary Stevenson

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Every morning I peeked out of the window from my bunk bed and tried to spot my dad’s face in the windows of the trains that thundered through my back garden and shook every inch of my house. I didn’t want to be poor my whole life.

I got a job in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf which I’d been able to see from my street. My job was to predict the future strength of economies by betting on interest rates. I started in June 2008.

Three months later, the financial world collapsed. Central banks, including the Bank of England, flooded huge amounts of new money into the system. Economists and traders predicted a rapid, V-shaped recovery in 2009. That prediction got pushed back to 2010, and then 2011.

IN 2011, I realised those economists were wrong. The sharp contrast between the lives of the wealthy investment bankers around me, and my friends and family back in Ilford, had made me realise that the new money was flowing not to ordinary working people, but to the rich.

The rich, flush with cash, were not using that money to buy goods and services, to drive the economy, they were using it to buy houses and stocks.