At times, during this protracted global recession, it seems as if the entire world depended on home equity loan-fueled U.S. consumption to maintain GDP growth. De-coupling -- the notion that the emerging market economies of China, India, Brazil and Russia were independent of the developed world, from a GDP growth standpoint, and were self-sustaining -- has been quickly dispelled. "De-coupling" has about as much validity as another ruse that made the rounds in the last boom (as it does in all expansions): the fallacy of "this time it's different" – the notion that some economic phenomenon can continue indefinitely. During the last expansion there was a widely-held view that housing prices, despite numerous metrics that showed that housing prices had hit bubble levels, could rise at double-digit rates annually, for a decade or more.
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