The party's over and we have to face the same financial facts of life as the rest of the world, writes Jacob Greber.
Australia's economic story has entered a dangerous phase, with offshore observers waiting for the comeuppance they see as long overdue.
It must have been horribly frustrating for all those commentators, policymakers and investors living with recessions blowing through Britain, Europe and the United States. For seven long years they were forced to watch the wunderkind of the post-global financial crisis era enjoying abundance, low unemployment and high incomes. 
Worst of all, while the rest of the world suffered soaring unemployment, Australians were living high on the hog thanks to a resources boom built on a lottery-win endowment and proximity to the biggest and fastest wave of industrialisation in history.
Australia and its people lucked their way through a dream run, the story goes, extending their stretch of continuous economic growth to almost 2\xC2&#189; decades.
As good as it was (and much of the hype was clearly overstated), the tailwind has now turned to a stiff headwind. The terms of trade - basically a measure of what the rest of the world pays us - has tumbled 33 per cent since late 2011. Unemployment has held above 6 per cent for much of the past year.
The federal budget is mired in political stalemate. Big business is on an investment strike. And that great barometer of how Australians feel about their place in the world, the dollar, has shed more than a fifth of its value over the past year - and about a third since hitting its 2011 high of US1.09Â¢.
Now the party is over, many of those same foreign observers are watching the shift with unconstrained glee.
Analyst notes to investors and news services are doing a roaring trade in retailing Australia's changed realities. Some reporting is not surprisingly bordering on hysteria.
The Daily Telegraph of London recently declared that the commodities crash could turn Australia into a "new Greece". During the boom, when China couldn't buy enough of what Australia dug out of the ground, the "country's economy resembled oil-rich Saudi Arabia", the paper opined.
Now Australia, with its terms of trade falling and despite "decades of effort to diversify, is looking ever more like a petrodollar economy of the Middle East, but without the vast horde of foreign currency reserves to fall back on when commodity prices fall. Instead, Australians must borrow to maintain the standards of living that the country has become accustomed to, which even some Greeks will admit is unsustainable."
Ignored by the article are the many factors that would mitigate against such an outcome, including but not limited to the fact that Australia has its own currency; owns ample reserves of pretty much every resource you'd ever want; is built on a diversified economy in which services account for more than 60 per cent of gross domestic product; possesses a tax system that actually collects tax; sits close to the fastest-growing region in the world; and, perhaps most importantly of all, possesses a healthy set of institutions such as the Reserve Bank of Australia.
While the London Telegraph's analysis is simplistic and weakened by journalistic cherry-picking, it is symptomatic of how global perceptions about Australia are being downgraded.
This matters a lot because Australian households, businesses and governments rely very much on how the rest of the world judges their ability to repay the money they've been lent, much of it from abroad.
UBS economist George Tharenou estimates that total debt to GDP has surged 17 per cent in the second quarter from a year earlier to 239 per cent - the fastest deterioration on record.
Household debt to GDP stands at 122 per cent, followed by business debt at 72 per cent and government debt at 46 per cent - levels that are common in many other advanced economies, Tharenou says.
In other words, the exceptionalism of the post-GFC era is well and truly over. That could spell trouble for investors expecting the Australian dollar to recover.
JACOB GREBER
Jacob Greber is the economics correspondent for The Australian Financial Review and writes on the intersection of politics and the economy.