Given the importance of money to economic activity, the most straightforward answer to a slump is action by the state to boost the quantity of money. That was indeed the conclusion drawn by Friedman and Schwartz about the Great Depression. According to their analysis, the American central bank, the Federal Reserve, ought in the early 1930s to have conducted expansionary open market operations in order to boost the quantity of money. In late 2008, with the key pointers to the economy still worsening, officials at the Treasury and the Bank of England started to prepare papers on how such operations might be organised in a programme of "quantitative easing" (or QE). As Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, said in a BBC interview in February 2009 ahead of the policy's adoption, the aim would be deliberately to boost the quantity of money. 

In Beyond the Crash, Brown does mention QE. In the section "August 2008" he is boastful and conceited, and dramatises his role. In his words, "The more I explored the lessons from the past and cross-referenced them with the data from the present, the more it became clear that a huge fiscal stimulus and substantial quantitative easing would both be necessary." Anyone reading this might be fooled into thinking not only that QE was Brown's brainchild, but that he was alert to its potential long before its actual implementation. 

Unfortunately for Brown there is a rival account of these events, based on evidence from a large number of participants, in Andrew Rawnsley's The End of the Party. The fact is that in August 2008 Brown knew next to nothing about QE. According to Rawnsley, Brown's first reaction to the QE idea was "horror", so that "publicly and privately he ruled it out". It was only in late December 2008, with financial markets and the economy in turmoil, and the bank recapitalization clearly not working, that he started to contemplate QE. Again to quote Rawnsley, "When he left London for his Christmas break in Fife, he took with him holiday reading composed of a large number of papers on quantitative easing." For anyone well-versed in monetary theory and much derided economic orthodoxy, QE was a relatively obvious remedy to falling national expenditure. But to Brown and his colleagues it was a desperate measure, a leap in the dark that they had to try because everything else (including "the huge fiscal stimulus") had failed. 

Brown has a tendency to link world-shattering events (or what he thinks are world-shattering events) to the trivia of his everyday life. Of his visit to New York  in late September 2008, he writes, "Addressing first the United Nations and then the Clinton Global Initiative, I laid out the arguments I had first formulated during my hours of reading in Suffolk in the summer." So a holiday in a Southwold cottage becomes the stuff of geopolitics. Melodrama is never far away. "At the time [September 2008], no other government was proposing the actions that we determined on as our plane powered through the darkness." What on earth has a plane powering through the darkness got to do with banking system capital?