China holds quite a few dollars and is wary of the USA's plans on trying to spend its way out of this recession in case their value slumps. There's an argument that all these rescue plans are just prolonging the inevitable, just as the boom was stretched by Greenspan's actions making it a huge bust to mirror the huge boom. What's needed is a hard crash in asset prices, houses, stocks, commodities, etc., until buyers are convinced that a hard bottom has been found. Then they'll be interested in buying again. And companies going to the wall in that time is a good thing; it culls the weak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
There's still worried talk of deflation. I think they're over concerned. There's some things I must buy, even if they're a bit cheaper tomorrow, e.g. food, and if my TV breaks, I'll replace it. By over-compensating for fear of deflation, we're facing high double-digit inflation in a year or so.
Reminds me of that old matra: For deflation, hold cash. For inflation, hold gold. For hyper-inflation, hold guns.
While Soviets often had a patriotic admiration of their country, it was often framed in the sense of the USSR being better than someone else, rather than on its own merits. Also, people were more locally pariotic: Russians were more Russian and Ukrainians more Ukrainian than Soviet.
Do Americans strongly identify themselves by their home state? In my experience (as an outsider) they do in a somewhat relaxed manner, but nowhere near the extremes of their pride and hope in the United States of America as a country. The strong inter-state migration also appears to support this.