From "The Japan Fallacy" by Richard Katz printed in the current Foreign Affairs, March/April 2009, Volume 88, Number 2

"The biggest financial losses are coming not form loans taken out by household or business borrowers but in the shadow banking system. Because if the leverage inherent in financial derivatives - which are designed so that a one percent hike in real estate prices can create a much larger gain in asset-backed securities - a small loss in the value of the underlying assets can be multiplied several times over. Far more significant is the psychological factor: by mid-December 2008, pure panic had pushed the value of AAA-rated commercial-mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) down to 68 percent of their face values, despite a commercial mortgage delinquency of only one percent."

It is an interesting article comparing the Japanese lost decade after their Real Estate bubble burst to our current situation. For many valid and well detailed reasons, Richard Katz shows their is no correlation or similarity and we will not suffer a similar fate to Japan's "Lost Decade".