The painful experience of excessive regulation in the United States is still close at hand. When the recession triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis ended in mid-2009, economists predicted a strong economic recovery. At the beginning of 2010, the office of administration and budget had predicted that the average growth rate of real gross domestic product (GDP) in 2016 would be 3.7%, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the growth rate in the same period would be 3.3%, and the Federal Reserve expected that the growth rate would be 3.5% to 4% in 2014. In fact, during the economic recovery from 2010 to 2016, GDP growth fell to 2.1%, the lowest level in 80 years.