Being reviewed:
Industry
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“Listen, degenerates. This is a week you dream about in markets.” Echoing across a cavernous trading floor, these words open an episode of the HBO television drama Industry, set in a London-based investment bank named Pierpoint. The speaker is Rishi Ramdani, a South Asian British trader at Pierpoint known for his cutthroat competence. The source of Rishi’s echoing enthusiasm is an “emergency budget” that the British government is expected to introduce later that week. How will the market respond? Place your bets.
The character of Rishi has tended to stand in the wings of Industry’s narrative universe. Yet this episode, titled “White Mischief,” from the show’s third season quite literally passes the mic to Rishi, propelling him to center stage for its entire duration. In the fourth season of Industry, aired in winter 2026, Rishi has once again retreated to the wings; he may even have jumped off the stage altogether. Watched today, this flare of an episode from 2024 flashes even more brightly. It burns an afterimage onto the eyes that stays long after Rishi is no longer the camera’s primary subject. Through this character, “White Mischief” casts fascinating light on the changing shapes and shadows of race in contemporary Britain that are worth returning to and lingering upon.
The opening of “White Mischief” presents the recognizable professional identity of Rishi, who trades money based on predicted future outcomes in the global financial market. But as the episode continues, it reveals a less familiar personal side: his own finances. We learn that Rishi is addicted to gambling. He is struggling to climb out of a personal debt hole from betting on horses by descending into it deeper still. However, Industry insists that this is not strictly speaking a personal crisis. Gambling is, after all, not just something that Rishi does in secret, with no paper trail and change shaken from his colleagues’ hefty pockets. Gambling is Rishi’s day job too: it is how those pockets got hefty to begin with.
What distinguishes a better at the racetrack from a trader on the trading floor? “White Mischief” insists on connecting these two worlds. A debilitatingly indebted Rishi stakes his financial redemption on a bet so big that it will either help him coast the choppy waters he’s in or drown him definitively. And he makes this “big bet” not under the cover of dark in clandestine calls to his bookmaker but rather on his company-issue “Bloomie,” one of the many Bloomberg Terminals sitting under the bright white light that illuminates the Pierpoint trading floor.
When Rishi’s boss, Eric, asks how he is positioned in the days leading up to the government’s emergency budget announcement, Rishi responds: “I am long sterling.” He has bet that the value of the pound will appreciate in a market affirmation of the policies that the budget is expected to lay out. Rishi’s chips are stacked on sterling.
But the metaphorical strain of this statement suggests that Rishi’s position is more than just a strategic investment choice; it belies a deeper identification. Faced with “the seemingly abstract quality of any debt,” Leigh Claire La Berge and Dehlia Hannah suggest we “consider what it is indexed to.” “I am long sterling,” we might take Rishi to be saying: the individual man becomes his investment. “Cutting taxes, throwing fucking coal into the furnace. A proper manifestation of what we truly believe in. A no-bullshit free market vision”: Rishi gleefully explains his confidence in the predicted effects of the impending budget announcement.
Gambling with big bets against challenging odds, regarded warily by moneylenders, questioned about the ability to balance the books, needing to take on more debt to pay back older debt. Who exactly are we talking about here: Rishi or Britain?
Rishi’s bet is not entirely explained as the personal impulse of a gambler or the dispassionate professional position of a trader. Somewhere in the way his chips are stacked is the posturing of a patriot. When one of Rishi’s neighbors expresses concern about the effects of the proposed budget’s slashing of the top tax rate on “the little guy,” Rishi defends the policy moves: “It’s a bet on Britain.”
The emergency budget that catalyzes this episode seems to be a veiled reference to the “mini budget” introduced in September 2022 by the Liz Truss-led Conservative government in Britain. The announcement triggered a crisis in the market and led to a sharp drop in the value of the British pound. Similarly, in this episode, once the budget is announced, sterling stumbles. “If the UK can’t pay its debt, then the pound is gonna be in the toilet,” predicts Sweetpea, a trainee at Pierpoint.
Might the identification implied in Rishi’s statement “I am long sterling” go deeper still? Gambling with big bets against challenging odds, regarded warily by moneylenders, questioned about the ability to balance the books, needing to take on more debt to pay back older debt. Who exactly are we talking about here: Rishi or Britain?
For much of Industry, Rishi has occupied the outer orbit of its narrative universe. Far from the focal point of the show’s posters, he stands at their edges or beyond the frame altogether. But as critics repeatedly note, even from this distance, Rishi makes his presence felt. Viewers of Industry’s first two seasons were drawn to the sharply written one-liner quips and takes that Rishi delivered, sometimes entirely offscreen, sliding into its subtitles. Even away from the camera, his cocksure voice courses through the scene like a live current: not seen but intensely felt. What we do see casts an unmissable image. Rishi’s unflinching tongue swaggers across the trading floor, poised to pick a fight.
The episode “White Mischief,” with the camera trained on Rishi’s storyline for close to an hour, is thus entirely unprecedented in the show’s history. But it also seems to have simply been a matter of time. Finally in the spotlight, Rishi casts his spell with feverish intensity. First he pontificates to the trading floor from his desk, then he presides over an audience of the South England elite of Somerset at a Christmas party he hosts. Among the crowd are Rishi’s white wife, Diana, and her parents. As his mother-in-law shares with him her plans to go “off-book” for the Boxing Day menu with a “very accessible red-cabbage biryani,” those gathered call on Rishi as expert City trader to weigh in on the future of the nation. Having recently bought some estate land in this posh part of the country where he now lives with Diana and their newborn son, Hugo, Rishi seems to not only count himself among this elite but also to be capable of commanding their attention.
But an unexpected knock at Rishi’s door breaks the spell that he seemed to be casting. Is the camera light that shines on him a show light or a searchlight? On the other side of the door is his childhood friend Vinay, who unexpectedly shows up at Rishi’s fancy home with a gift for the newborn; he hands over an envelope with money in it.
But very soon we learn that Vinay is not there to confer gifts: he is there to collect. His arrival reveals that Rishi is a serial gambler; he has been betting on horses and losing. Repeatedly. Vinay is Rishi’s bookmaker and is getting impatient about his client’s overdue payments. Rishi has staked and sunk not only his own money but also money pooled from his increasingly reluctant Pierpoint colleagues, to whom he repeatedly lies about the outcome of his bets. Every time, Rishi hopes that a bigger gamble will help him cover losses that would appear small in comparison. But his strategy has failed, and now the debt collector has come calling. Rishi, who appeared to be fiercely, aggressively a man of his own, begins to unravel under the weight of what he owes.
At the beginning of the episode, Rishi had already staked chips worth £625 million on trades predicting the market’s favorable response to the government’s emergency budget. But when the budget is finally announced, the market doesn’t appear to share Rishi’s enthusiasm. Assessing the implications of this budget on Britain’s public debt beforehand, an exasperated Sweetpea had worried: “Is this really the time to be testing investors’ willingness to lend to the UK? Like, do they understand how macroeconomics works?” It seems that Rishi may have wagered on the wrong side of this bet. When he responds to Sweetpea’s apprehensions by agitatedly reiterating, “But it’s a big bet on Britain!” she can only offer a tepid reply: “Okay.”
This episode blurs the boundaries between Rishi’s private debt and Britain’s public debt, suggesting an analogy between the two entities. However, this analogy repeatedly risks failure.
The analogy between the private finances of a household and the public finances of a nation has been the subject of some debate—it even, surprisingly, has its own Wikipedia page. Although political leaders often turn to the private individual’s situation to illustrate the state of a country’s public finances, experts insist that the analogy is flawed. An individual and a nation are not commensurate economic units: their ability to take on debt and the terms by which they repay it mark important distinctions between them.
But another failure looms over the parallel that the episode suggests between Rishi and Britain, centered on the question of race. Rishi’s racial identity bubbles intermittently yet insistently to the surface. A desire for identification with the nation is, after all, a quintessential trope of diasporic assimilation narratives, particularly when the desired identification is with as storied a cultural signifier as “British.” So we may indeed place Rishi’s bet on the government’s “bet on Britain” in this particular discursive genealogy, as the expression of that diasporic desire for identification, for assimilation.
However, the episode repeats that a logic of money is an inadequate substitute for the racial logics that Rishi seeks to supersede. Just before Vinay reveals that Rishi is neck-deep in gambling debt, Rishi shares that even though he is now the rightful owner of the estate grounds they are walking on, he is unable to shrug off the skin of being an intruder: “I mean it’s mine, but it feels like it’s theirs.” Moments later, Vinay and Rishi’s heated exchange over Rishi’s delayed payments is interrupted. Shining a light on the two brown men, a white neighbor chastises: “There’s no loitering by here,” to which Rishi snaps back: “Loitering? I own the fucking place.” Preceded and followed by moments of racial tension, the conversation that reveals Rishi’s financial debt asks to be read alongside such narratives of dispossession. The possibility of reading Rishi’s indebtedness as a mirror for Britain’s condition is profoundly suggestive, given that a man who looks like him is not usually conjured as an image of this nation. The parallel risks failure because Rishi’s claim to his place in the nation remains under scrutiny.
And yet, while the revelation of Rishi’s financial debt is flanked by these two moments of his racial debt, the financial debt also interrupts and complicates the racial debt narrative. There is no easy collapse between these two logics of dispossession. The episode may remind us of the limits of an analogy between Rishi and Britain, but it draws this analogy nonetheless. It tempts analogical failure but still tenders it.
In the aftermath of the government’s emergency budget announcement in the episode, the value of the pound continues to depreciate, causing Rishi profound despair. Eventually the government decides to pull back its proposed policy moves: it makes a U-turn. The vision that Rishi had so confidently put his force behind seems to have fallen through.
But as this happens, Rishi’s fortunes paradoxically take a turn for the better. He doubles down even harder on his bet, increasing the value of his position at the last minute. With the policy reversal, the value of the pound begins to appreciate. In a matter of minutes, with some nifty and shockingly risky last-minute trading, Rishi, who had been up to his eyes in debt, suddenly finds himself breathing all the air that a cool £18 million can buy. This is what the record will show: Rishi has made the company £18 million in a matter of minutes. It has been a successful trade by any monetary measure, albeit on the back of volatile government policy that is no closer to solving the country’s entrenched economic difficulties.
But this is not the story of Britain that Rishi sees. As if to restore the analogy, a literally battered, black-eyed Rishi concludes this tense round of last-minute buying and selling of British pounds by announcing on the mic: “Rule Britannia.” The irony of a brown man claiming this colonial slogan is worth noting, and the irony doesn’t run out in this racial register. There is something deflationary about a song reminiscent of epic colonial exploits being deployed for a financial exchange of comparable worth that requires nothing more than Rishi screaming “Mine! Mine! Mine!” on the trading floor in a reckless spree.
Perhaps what makes the analogy between Rishi and Britain work despite the snags of racial difference is what Grace Blakeley calls “the financialisation of everyday life” in contemporary Britain, an idea examined by theorist Randy Martin. Commentators and scholars have repeatedly noted the deleterious effects of an increasingly powerful financial sector in the City of London on the sluggish British economy. In light of the growing influence of financial markets in the world, Martin writes, “Finance today signals a whole range of ways in which culture, economy, and polity—the very fabric of material and symbolic life—have become interwoven.” From the specialized activities of the trading floor, finance has expanded into a “generalized social logic of risk” that governs contemporary everyday life. Such financialization doesn’t override long-entrenched racial logics but runs alongside them, in some moments cutting over them but in other moments being cut over in turn.
Four decades back, in 1985, theaters in Britain witnessed the unexpected success of a film written by the firebrand British Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi called My Beautiful Laundrette. Released at the height of 1980s Thatcherism when the financial sector was starting to grow into the giant force that it is today, Laundrette centers on the travails of members of an enterprising British Pakistani family who seek to reverse the weight of indebtedness borne by the immigrant. The film suggests that one strategy is an aggressively acquisitive entrepreneurialism: to embrace the logics of Thatcherism and to reverse their diasporic debt with material excess. As one of the characters pithily puts it, “We’re nothing in England without money.” Money never felt so real.
Rishi, with his dreams of a “Santorini white” home at the Somerset estate, in many ways suggests the lingering of that vision. The difference is that now England too is having to contemplate the reality of its finances. What’s different also is that money feels increasingly unreal. “Come on, Bobby. Money is an illusion. It’s a social construct built on trust,” Rishi tells his colleague, to cajole more money out of him for betting on horses. The condition of debt once marked the divide between the diasporic and the host nation. This condition now seems to be what connects them—both subject to the capriciousness of an unreal global finance with very real consequences. 
This article was commissioned by Sarah Kessler.
