'The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand,' then presidential candidate Barack Obama told a cheering crowd in Berlin in July 2008. (Markus Schreiber/Associated Press)

To the naked eye, everything here still seems okay.

You look through the window of a restaurant and people are seated and eating. There are new cars in the traffic outside my office. I went to the liquor store the other day for some holiday supplies and it was pretty busy.

But everything here is not okay.

Americans are poorer than they were this time last year. Their pensions and their life savings have shrunk as stock market values have evaporated. Job security is disappearing, corporate health insurance along with it. Fear has set in.

Sixty-somethings who were ready to retire are now looking at five, maybe 10 more years of work.

Everything seems to have changed. Some investors are actually buying U.S. treasury bills for zero, or even negative yield. Such is their fright that they're accepting a return of slightly less than they are putting in. That amounts to stuffing the mattress.

A fool's paradise

It's hard not to be angry about all this. So much of it, as someone said in a story I did recently for The National, is bound up in events "the ordinary man can't control."

Federal agents escort handcuffed former Bear Stearns hedge fund manager Matthew Tannin in June 2008. He was one of over 400 U.S. fund and real estate managers indicted in the wake of the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. (Louis Lanzano/Associated Press)

That's a polite way of saying this mess is someone else's making. Someone greedy and stupid.

The Washington Post condensed the situation perfectly in a superb investigative report recently: the reporter showed that even in 2007, when it was manifestly clear the U.S. housing market was tanking, investment houses like Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns were not only selling the rotten, mortgage-backed debt that caused the meltdown, they were aggressively stepping up sales as they felt the party ending.

It was clear by that point that much of what they were selling was garbage, yet they were determined to stoke the profit furnace while they still could.

Many here feel that those who pursued these kinds of business tactics should be behind bars. Instead, a worried, impoverished public has to bail them out, lest they drag even more people down into the sulfurous mud.

But then, not all of this debacle was somebody else's fault. Looking at the restaurant diners and the people in the checkout line at the liquor store, there's no way of knowing how many are so hopelessly in debt that they'll never climb out.

Credit card detox

So many Americans are so indebted — the average household credit card balance here is nearly $9,000 — that this country needs the financial equivalent of a stint in detox.

Millions of people today owe more on their houses than their houses are worth, especially now that values have fallen into the basement.

No more lines of credit for them. In fact, many of them can't shop anymore. They might not be able to again for years.

That is why increasing numbers of economists are saying we'll be lucky if this is merely a recession.

America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, is furiously printing money, stuffing credit into banks, hoping the sheer brute force of government spending will stop the decline.

But nothing has worked yet. And that is what is really scary.

I remember my father talking about the privations of the Great Depression, how he struggled for jobs and how he was laid off at a stone-crushing quarry to make room for a married man.

My father wouldn't use a credit card and he didn't trust stock markets. He saved and paid cash all his life. That attitude always seemed like overheated anxiety from another era. But it doesn't now.

A debt to be repaid

Anyway, I've been in the U.S. for several years now and the more I live among Americans, the more I like them.

I've written on this website before about their work ethic and their individual willingness to do the right thing, to give to charity and, often, to step forward when the rest of the world is shying away from a tough problem.

(I took some heat for saying so, incidentally. One thing I had not realized, until CBC started printing readers' comments at the end of columns, was the depth of antipathy toward Americans on the part of some Canadians.)

But it isn't just the people. The lifestyle here is addictive. You get used to less government and to paying a pittance in sales tax, or no tax at all if you buy online. You get used to the low prices that result from cutthroat competition and you get used to plenty of everything, all the time, everywhere.

There's a price to be paid, of course. The public debt is ballooning, services are shrinking, and the country is still fighting two wars. Sooner or later, everybody's going to have to pay more taxes. Welcome to the White House, Barack Obama.

So, what's ahead?

In deference to the new reality, Americans have throttled back their spending, which is having the effect of spreading its recession to all those countries used to selling into the great U.S. market.

But there have been other mood changes here as well, some of which have to be cheering up a world that spends so much time in the American orbit.

For one, the national convulsion of patriotic correctness that followed the 9/11 attacks is fading.

For a while, after 2001, there was a nagging insecurity in being a foreigner in the U.S., even a Canadian one who could pass for a local most of the time.

The Bush administration made it clear that "aliens" like me had fewer rights than Americans, or no rights at all, if the government so chose. It was best to watch what you said.

Today, though, the War on Terror banners have mostly disappeared from cable TV; the courts are ordering a return to due process; the Guantanamo Bay prison camp is close to shutting down; and Americans are not nearly as concerned as they once were about lashing out at the world.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin during the vice-presidential debate. (Ron Edmonds/Associated Press)

My predictions?

Well, since you're asking, I predict Barack Obama will be a boring president. Competent, thoughtful, measured, but boring. "No-drama Obama" was his campaign motto. Discipline above all. Get used to it.

(I also predict the Washington press corps will be missing Republican heartthrob Sarah Palin six months from now.)

This economic nightmare will permit few of his campaign promises. Obama will spend the first few years of his presidency trying to keep the national economy from sinking.

And he probably won't be able to increase taxes on wealthy Americans anytime in the next few years, as he promised. Those new taxes were supposed to finance a new national health-care system. It's hard to imagine that appearing during his first term, either.

In fact, if this recession stretches out, Obama may not have a second term; voters generally blame economic problems on their leaders, regardless of whose watch they began under.

I predict President Obama will, like so many of his forerunners, try to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, once the current round of hostilities winds down. Having lived there, I wish him the best of luck.

I predict Canada-U.S. relations will remain cordial, friendly and unremarkable.

I predict the price of gas will go back up and everybody will want a Prius again. Sorry, Detroit. Sorry, Canadian branch plants.

And I predict someone will shove these predictions back in my face this time next year.