If America sneezes, the rest of the World catches a cold

From The Globe and Mail (Canada):

The housing collapse heard round the world

Real estate agent Andrea Gaus knew the market was out of whack when the price of a typical four-bedroom house near good schools in the leafy Maryland suburbs of Washington shot past the $1-million (U.S.) mark.

“It got to the point where appreciation was so high that it priced people out of the market,” Ms. Gaus said.

But the peak has passed, and the consequences of the deflating bubble are buffeting the housing market, in Washington and across the United States.
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“Look how fast prices were going up. The same thing is happening on the way down,” observed Ms. Gaus, who's been selling homes in Potomac for 16 years.

“It's a very tough market.”

The once red-hot housing market has fizzled. And the topic du jour among economists, investors and policy makers is whether the end of the housing boom signals the beginning of the end of a long run for the world's mightiest economy, and by association, the rest of the planet.

The U.S. housing crash may prove to be the economic equivalent of the canary in the coal mine — a warning of impending danger in an economy that has surged too far, too fast. Many experts are now openly speculating about a possible U.S. recession next year, brought on by consumers reacting to the shrinking value of their nest egg. If they're right, the fallout could prove to be far nastier than the collapse of the technology bubble at the start of the decade.
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Think it all doesn't matter to you? Think again. For nearly a decade now, the United States has been the economic driver for much of the world — Canada included. The United States has been sucking up excess savings and consuming everything in sight, from cars to homes and everything that goes in them.

“It's hard to imagine that a U.S.-centric global economy wouldn't be at risk in the aftermath of a bursting of the U.S. housing bubble,” warned Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach, one of Wall Street's most outspoken worrywarts.

“The non-U.S. world remains heavily reliant on selling exports to wealth-dependent American consumers. As the United States comes to grips with the aftershocks of another post-bubble shakeout, so too must the rest of the world.”

As he put it: “If the American consumer sneezes, countries in both the developed and the developing world could easily catch a cold.”