You may have ended your counterfactual story too soon. It's hardly a triviality that it would have destroyed trillions of perceived middle class wealth. Such a perceptual shift changes the characteristics of consumer demand in a way that would have massive worldwide impact. Not only would American businesses have suffered (many fatally), and dramatically reduced investment, but American debt-financed consumer demand is one of our biggest exports, and would have precipitated even more disastrous global readjustments. This is the kind of thing that causes loss of life (through revolutions and wars, if not simple starvation) in poorer countries and regions.