Nouriel Roubini makes a very very good point in his essay American Un-Beauty: The Crisis of the Suburbian (McMansions and Gas-Guzzling SUVs) Way of Life:

The result was that the U.S. invested too much – especially in the last eight years – in building its stock of wasteful larger and larger homes and housing capital and of larger and larger private motor vehicles (whose effect on the productivity of labor is zero) and has not invested enough in the accumulation of productive physical capital (equipment, machinery, etc.) that leads to an increase in the productivity of labor and increases long run economic growth.

Basically, the as a society no longer invests in productivity, it invests in consumption (and I would add arbitrage to the mix), which means that in a world where increasing productivity is the path to greater standards of living, the United States is not even in the game.