The book includes first-hand accounts of events leading to previous successful cases of international collaboration on economic affairs.

The Prologue relates how Brown decided to go ahead with his ground breaking recapitalisation plan for British banks during a transatlantic plane flight on 26 September 2008.

He says it's essential for emerging economic giants like China to boost their consumption further if global growth is to be optimised and the crises is to be fully overcome.

Brown relates lessons from the earlier crisis, such as how the successful response by the Hong Kong authorities to the double play speculative attack showed that well executed government intervention can sometimes prevail over hostile markets.

He diagnoses that the international community's inadequate response to the 1997 crisis is one of the reasons for the current crises, as it prompted emerging nations to focus excessively on building up foreign reserves, thus contributing to global imbalances.

He refers to "industrial scale moneymaking" (p84) and describes the actions of Lehman Brothers in particular as "unethical financial practices that were, right up to boardroom level, connived at, condoned and rewarded."

He goes on to note that the scale of the UK emergency bail-out was 10% of the salaries the bankers paid themselves from 2000 to 2007 (p106) and argued for a global financial levy in return for the "risks the public takes" and the "implicit support banks enjoy from the government" (p106).

Brown sketches the specific challenges facing the US including their high level of net debt and on-going current account deficit.

Brown praises India as a country that has achieved high growth without worsening global imbalances, which she had done by not running either a large current account surplus or deficit.

Brown says it's important for deficit reduction plans to be combined with growth friendly policy and that greater fiscal co-operation and flexibility will be needed to keep the Eurozone together.

He says that different regions are called on to act in different ways, but if nations work collaboratively it will help them better achieve both their individual domestic goals and to boost global growth as a whole.

The Appendix relates a speech Brown made back in 1998, in the aftermath of the Asian financial crises, discussing the need for enhanced global cooperation on economic issues.

Skidelsky identifies two major acts of global leadership, the recapitalisation of banks and the coordination of fiscal and monetary stimulus, especially the one trillion dollar package announced at the London G-20 Summit.

But Lipsey suggests Brown does deserve some of the criticism from the left, who argue he did too little to punish bankers for the crisis and allowed too many of the consequences to fall on ordinary people.

He suggests though that Brown was wrong to claim the London G20 had saved the world from a global depression, saying the effect of the package agreed at that summit were "marginal and transitory."

Gray argues that Brown had largely accepted neoliberal economic thinking, leading to his advocacy of light touch regulation for the City.