Brown: I Am Not A Finance Expert…

December 7, 2010 at 11:08 am

“I am neither a finance expert nor a trained economist but fear of making technical mistakes (of which, I am sure, this book is full) should not silence us altogether when the task before us is so urgent.”

Hang on. Isn’t this the chap who ran the UK economy for a decade? Who treated the Treasury’s expert officials with open contempt and relied instead on a handful of cronies? Who proclaimed the end of boom and bust, before presiding over the biggest bust since the 1930s? And all the while he was an amateur. I’ll be jiggered. It’s rather nice to have this admission of his fallibility – it would have been even nicer to have had it before the roof fell in on the British economy.

David Hughes in the Telegraph

Such is the excitement today on the publication day of Beyond the Crash it is currently 727nd on the Amazon bestsellers list – struggling just ahead of (for example) Vintage Handbags by Marnie Fogg and Behavior of Pipe Piles in Sand: Plugging & Pore-Water Pressure Generation During Installation and Loading by Magued Iskander.

By contrast Tony Blair’s A Journey, published on September 1, this morning is a mere 694 places ahead of him at No 33.