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Global markets are reeling from news that Dubai World, the investment arm of Dubai's government, is
seeking to suspend payments
for its massive debt. Dubai, once seen as the Middle East playground
for the super-wealthy, appears unable to support its breakneck
construction and infrastructure projects. Bloomberg News
reports
it could owe as much as $80 to $90 billion. Will financial markets on
Wall Street as well as Europe and Asia recover or will Dubai's descent
drag them down? How worried should we be about Dubai?
- Isolated Incident, The New York Times's Paul Krugman argues. "[Y]ou can see this as basically just another commercial real estate bust.
Either you view Dubai World as nothing special, despite sovereign
ownership, as Willem Buiter does;
or you think of the emirate as a whole as, in effect, a highly
leveraged CRE investor facing the same problems as many others in the
same situation. Finally, you can see Dubai as sui generis. And really, there has been nothing else quite like it."
- Disaster Averted? Time's Justin Fox urges calm. "As of this morning, things are already calming down a bit. Some Asian
markets were down sharply overnight, and U.S. stock markets started the
day 2% down. But European markets, which took the brunt of the hit
yesterday, are up on the day," he writes. "A return to the indiscriminate panic of last fall would be really bad.
A move toward a more skeptical attitude toward risky assets, in which
investors feel compelled to do more work to sort out the dodgy from the
relatively safe, would be a really healthy development. So far I think
we're getting the second reaction."
- How This Could Go Wrong TalkingPointsMemo's Josh Marshall explains. "In itself the numbers aren't that big (measured on a global scale),
only tens of billions of dollars. But if larger institutions turn out
to have a lot of exposure to it, and that pushes some of them back into
unstable territory and rushed liquidations of assets, the whole thing
could spread. At a minimum it's an example of the still quite risk
averse international financial markets."
- Willful Blindness by Global Investors The Guardian's Simon Tisdall insists
this was inevitable "Was anywhere heading for a fall so obviously as
Dubai? Yet why did no one ever scream? Why did everyone just marvel?
When
I first visited the place three years ago, it was already the most
dangerous speculative bubble on earth. Breakneck building – using
reputedly a quarter of the world's cranes – was sustained on hysterical
public relations and $80bn of debt. By last March the signs of
impending doom were everywhere. [...] Yet anyone who wrote a word of
the impending doom was excoriated," he writes. "But before the desert
sands close over it, Dubai's lesson should be
learned. It is the oldest in the book. Like the credit crunch in the
west, the short route to folly is the belief that what goes up need
never come down and there is no such thing as bad money."
- Further Decline of Dollar Reuters's Felix Salmon registers
surprise that the news sent the Dollar down and Japanese Yen up. "When
the markets are really scared, they tend to flee to the safety of the
dollar, rather than to the Japanese yen," he writes. "[I]t's clearly
not good news that a severe-if-not-life-threatening shock
such as this one sends the dollar down rather than up. The immense
fiscal cost of the financial crisis has hurt the dollar’s standing as
the global reserve currency, and if I were at Treasury right now I’d be
very concerned about this reaction."
- Uncertainty Ahead The New Republic's Noam Scheiber gives some history. "You have to remember that the Great Depression only became “great,”
that is, global, when an obscure Austrian bank went under in 1931, and
set off a massive financial explosion around Europe. Capitalism is an
irrational system that is often full of unpleasant surprises. The
collapse of Dubai World may turn out to be nothing. But it could also
turn out be one of those unpleasant surprises."
-
Good Riddance, Dubai The U.K. Independent's Johann Hari fumes
at Dubai's "slavery" system of importing labor and its per capita
carbon emissions, the highest in the world. "Dubai is finally
financially bankrupt – but it has been morally
bankrupt all along. The idea that Dubai is an oasis of freedom on the
Arabian peninsular is one of the great lies of our time," he writes.
"The people who really built the city can be seen in long chain-gangs
by
the side of the road, or toiling all day at the top of the tallest
buildings in the world, in heat that Westerners are told not to stay in
for more than 10 minutes. They were conned into coming, and trapped
into staying."
