Take it from a former banker: the budget is for ordinary people. The mega-rich look on and laugh

‘We know that Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak, who are multimillionaires just like we are, will never tax us.’ A view of Canary Wharf, London. Photograph: Ashley Cooper pics/Alamy

In May 2010, I lost $8m in a week. I was 23 years old. Back then, I was an interest rates trader for Citibank in Canary Wharf. I had won that job only three years earlier in a card game while I was a maths student at LSE. At that time, the job was the culmination of a lifetime ambition. It was also an escape route from poverty.

What do you do when you are 23, and you have just lost $8m? And you know that if you let slip a few dollars more, you will also lose your job? I did what anyone else would do. I worked. I started bringing my old economics textbooks on to the trading floor, and studied them into the evenings. I wanted to understand where I’d gone wrong.