No one will be able to say that about Barack Obama.

Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, the new president will get a rare opportunity to leave a sweeping and long-lasting imprint on the U.S. economy. FDR's response to the Great Depression created such enduring institutions as Social Security and federal deposit insurance. Reaganomics, born of the 1981-82 recession, ushered in a quarter-century of lower tax rates and deregulation.

''Great leaders see in a crisis an opportunity, and not just an opportunity to perform crisis management,'' said presidential historian Richard Norton Smith.

There will be no shortage of opportunities in 2009. The U.S. is facing the deepest recession in more than 20 years, the worst financial crisis since World War II and a wave of foreclosures.

The new president probably will create a vastly larger economic role for the government. He will also permanently alter the relationship between financial markets and Washington, finish the job of reshaping the U.S. banking system begun under Bush, and - like it or not - will probably go down in history as the biggest deficit spender ever.

Obama, the 47-year-old Democratic senator from Illinois, has proposed having government invest in energy and manufacturing, while also creating a super-regulator to watch over markets to prevent another catastrophe.

Although Obama will have allies in the Democratic-controlled Congress, some of the broader financial proposals he and top party lawmakers are seeking probably will spark clashes with Wall Street, lenders and Republicans wary of sweeping changes.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, said last month that Congress will enact legislation next year ''comparable to what Franklin Roosevelt and Congress did in the New Deal'' to eliminate lapses that allowed the U.S. credit markets to deteriorate.

Frank has said Congress should consider either creating a separate agency or empowering the Federal Reserve to assess risk across the financial markets and intervene if necessary.

Steve Verdier, a lobbyist at the Washington-based Independent Community Bankers of America who represents about 5,000 smaller lenders, said his members ''would lobby hard'' against a single financial-services regulator.

''Over time, the leadership of a single unified agency would tend to focus on the largest institutions,'' he said. ''Community banks would be relegated to the backwaters of the agency and not be listened to.''

The first order of business for Obama will be to get lending restarted and revive the economy.

Unemployment may rise as high as 8 percent over the next year from September's 6.1 percent, while gross domestic product could contract at an annual rate of as much as 4 percent in the last three months of 2008 and again in the first three months of 2009, said Allen Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics in New York. ''The U.S. is in the middle of a long and deep recession.''

The president-elect is said to be open to another fiscal-stimulus effort, following in the steps of the $168 billion package President Bush signed earlier this year. An effective amount would be $300 billion to $500 billion, said Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs, reflecting ''the need to offset the sharp drop in spending relative to income by U.S. households and businesses.''

To alleviate the credit crisis, the new president may also need more than the $700 billion in taxpayer money Congress approved Oct. 3 in a plan Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson helped engineer.

''We have to recapitalize the banks,'' said Edmund Phelps, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for economics and a professor at Columbia University in New York. ''I don't imagine that there's enough money in the first Paulson plan to be able to do all that needs to be done in that direction.''

The bailout gives Paulson broad authority for ''providing stability to and preventing disruption in the economy and financial system,'' and Obama also will have leeway to shift the program in a direction more consistent with his own policies.

''The law is there, and it's not only for Paulson,'' said Peter Wallison, a former general counsel at the Treasury and now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ''It was written to provide a tremendous amount of latitude depending on what the circumstances are.''

To deal with rising foreclosures, the new president also will have to look at ways to help homeowners renegotiate mortgages. Already, the costs of rescuing the economy are driving government borrowing to previously unimagined levels.

The government posted a record budget shortfall of $455 billion in 2008, and analysts forecast the gap will balloon to more than $1 trillion in 2009 as expenses mount.

Obama has proposed a major overhaul of the tax code, made necessary by the 2010 expiration of most tax cuts passed under Bush.

''The next president is going to have to have two financial SWAT teams,'' said Barry Eichengreen, professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley.

''One to stabilize the crisis and staunch the bleeding, the other to focus on the issue of how to sustain long-run economic growth.''