The recession came at the best time that it could because it has given the US a chance to make permanent adjustments to the government’s economic and regulatory policies and has offered businesses and individuals the opportunity to change decades-old habits. It has also allowed the nation to look at its place in the world, especially its best options to compete with China and other emerging countries, in a way that would have been forestalled (阻止，阻碍) if the recession had not happened in 2008 and 2009. The cause of the recession is often blamed on financial firms that took astonishingly large risks with the goal of multiplying their earnings at unprecedented levels and consumers who were willing to aggressively borrow against inflated home values that were not sustainable. Government policies might have prevented this if regulators could have looked ahead in 2005 and seen the danger in financial firms trading in exotic financial instruments and offering homeowners loans based on rapidly rising home prices that, in some cases, were doubling every three or four years. Prescience, born of powerful deductive skills, could have caused regulators to sound alarm bells, but the collapse of the over-leveraged system was seen by very few experts until it was on top of the economy and in the process of ruining it.