To be sure, the large inflows of savings and low global interest rates presented a valuable opportunity to the recipient countries, provided they invested the inflows wisely. Unfortunately, this did not always occur, as an increased appetite for risk-taking – a "reaching for yield" – stimulated some financial innovations and lending practices that proved imprudent or otherwise questionable.
Regulators identified some of these issues in real time; for example, federal banking regulators issued new guidance on nontraditional mortgage lending and on commercial real estate lending.