As one global rating agency puts it: "What was a blessing before is now a curse."
That's how Standard & Poor's describes the impact of China's now slowing economy on Australia and other commodity exporters.
In a week in which about $60 billion was wiped off the ASX in just one frantic session on worries about the Chinese outlook and what it means for the mining sector, S&P chief economist for the Asia-Pacific Paul Gruenwald has declared Australia the "clear loser".
That's because of it being a large commodity-focused exporter and its strong trade links with China, its number one trading partner.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says Australia was undoubtedly a winner from China's demand for iron ore but the end of the mining boom has been entirely predictable.
In two reports from the International Monetary Fund this week, the risks facing Australia and other commodity exporting countries are highlighted.
The IMF says the weak commodity price outlook could subtract one percentage point annually from economic growth from these countries over the next two years.
For energy exporters, the drag is estimated to be even greater - 2.25 percentage points on average over the same period - reflecting a sharp downturn in oil prices over the past year.
In a separate report specifically on Australia, the IMF says there must be continued efforts to support economic demand and raise productivity in the transition to broader growth.
However, it is slightly more optimistic on Australia's growth outlook than others, predicting 2.5 per cent for this year and three per cent in the next, only slightly below the long-term average of 3.25 per cent.
Even so, the IMF says the Reserve Bank must be prepared to cut the cash rate - already at a record low of two per cent - if the recovery proves disappointing.
As of June, the annual growth rate was just two per cent after the smallest quarterly economic expansion in two years.
Other commodity exporters such as Canada and Brazil are already in recession.
JP Morgan Australia chief economist Stephen Walters does not expect Australia to follow suit, even though he says there is increased speculation among the international financial market fraternity that this has become an increased risk.
"While there is growing chatter about recession, no one yet is prepared to put a negative growth forecast where their gloomy mouth is," he says in an analysis.
He says it is difficult to make the arithmetic of a recession stack up when Australia is exporting record volumes of commodities, even if prices are much lower.
Also, recessions in Australia are usually triggered by domestic policy errors, not through troubles overseas.
Australia did not enter into a recession during the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, when its major trading partners did.
Nor did it suffer such a fate during the bursting of the dot.com bubble or tech-wreck in 2001 - a time when it was ridiculously considered an "old economy" because it was still "riding the sheep's back" and digging holes in the ground rather than making computer chips.
And of course, it avoided the worldwide recession following the 2008-09 global financial crisis.
Two potential domestic "policy errors", albeit extremely unlikely, would be if an over-zealous RBA raised interest rates too soon or too assertively, or the federal government embarked on an overly-aggressive budget repair program.
"It's difficult to make a plausible prediction of recession without making that call, which perhaps explains why no one actually is," Walters says.
Recessions are notoriously difficult to predict.
Or as RBA governor Glenn Stevens drolly puts it: there is "more or less" a 100 per cent probability of recession in Australia - only the timing is uncertain.
