Like samba, futebol and carnaval, “crise” (crisis) has long been a staple of the Brazilian popular lexicon. After all, Brazil suffered through nearly fifteen years of three digit price rises – the longest bout of hyperinflation in contemporary history – which ended only in 1994. But for the first time in recent memory Latin America’s largest nation is in a lather over someone else’s economic debacle. Talk of the U.S. credit crunch and its fallout permeates the chatter from newsrooms to boardrooms, and from beauty salons to corner bars. Newspapers and Web sites have broken out “crisis glossaries” to explain every nuance and twist of the gathering financial imbroglio – from subprime mortgages to stock market circuit breakers – to the curious and the bewildered.

Thanks largely to a bull run in the world’s tenth largest economy, which has kicked the economy into high gear (creating 1.9 million jobs this year alone) even as the U.S. economy stalls, until now many Brazilians have felt cocooned against the ruin in the international financial markets. National leaders have been remarkably calm and at times even flippant. “Thank God, the crisis has not crossed the Atlantic,” President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said as late as last weekend. “At the moment, the one who’s really worried is Bush,” he quipped to a reporter the day after Wall Street’s Black Monday, and even as the São Paulo Stock Market, Bovespa, fell by nearly 12 percent. Central Bank chief Henrique Meirelles predicted that, at most, Brazil might come down with “a bad cold” from the U.S. credit crisis.

Others are not so sure. Beyond the official spinmeisters, no one this side of the equator in the Americas is touting the wonders of decoupling anymore – that sunny notion that the emerging market economies will thrive even as the world’s largest economy stumbles. Upon learning of the stock market crash, Demétrio Martins, a fervent evagangelical Christian, who lives in the tough Rio de Janeiro favela Complexo do Alemão, said (channeling Sarah Palin) “we must be living the end of days.” Others are puzzled and a bit resentful over the potential fallout, as if a trusted world ally had suddenly let them down. “Just when Brazil’s economy is doing so well, along comes this guy [President Bush], screwing up everybody else’s lives,” says free lance office messenger Gilberto dos Santos Durval. Sebastião dos Santos Muniz, who sells fruit at a Rio street fair, was more philosophical. “My idea of the United States has totally changed,” he says. “How could a state that is so all powerful at the same time be so fragile and as vulnerable as everyone else?”