Posted on 11/27/2009 7:06:06 PM PST by Orange1998
Published: February 11, 2009
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Sofia, a 34-year-old Frenchwoman, moved here a year ago to take a job in advertising, so confident about Dubai’s fast-growing economy that she bought an apartment for almost $300,000 with a 15-year mortgage.
An abandoned car in a parking garage in Dubai. One report said 3,000 cars were sitting abandoned at the Dubai Airport.
Now, like many of the foreign workers who make up 90 percent of the population here, she has been laid off and faces the prospect of being forced to leave this Persian Gulf city — or worse.
“I’m really scared of what could happen, because I bought property here,” said Sofia, who asked that her last name be withheld because she is still hunting for a new job. “If I can’t pay it off, I was told I could end up in debtors’ prison.”
With Dubai’s economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield.
The government says the real number is much lower. But the stories contain at least a grain of truth: jobless people here lose their work visas and then must leave the country within a month. That in turn reduces spending, creates housing vacancies and lowers real estate prices, in a downward spiral that has left parts of Dubai — once hailed as the economic superpower of the Middle East — looking like a ghost town.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
And may I add Smarter!
Thanks for the right link. What an unbelieveably depressing story. It doesn’t surprise me. Like the Pizza Hut girl at the end of the article says: “everything is fake”.
Reminds me of Obammy and the Dims. All fake and built on shifting sand.
I also watch a lot of the History channel, Discovery, etc., and I’ve seen programs on all of this and my thoughts were the same. Where does all the money come from, how much does all of that cost, who’s going to pay for it all and who’s really going to live there. I didn’t and still don’t think it’s going to work. There is so much phony real estate developement in the world. Always has been.
And who the hell would want to live there? There are large areas of the world I don’t want to ever go to much less live there. Who the hell would would want to live in any Muslim country anyway except Muslim fanatics?
To me, all those places seem like hell on earth.
If you spend anymore time in Iraq you are going to go native!
good ones, thanks!
Take it as a leading indicator of what's really happening in the petro-kingdoms. UAE was where the elites did their banking and such, and took vacations in a slightly-less-restrictive environment.
This is a signal that all is not well in Saudi, Kuwait, and the rest. Their oil revenues are flat and their populations are growing. Each oil sheik has multiple wives and many children, each of whom expects to live as well as daddy, on a fraction of the pie.
The collapse will not be pretty.
The funny thing here is that a nuclear power plant, or a few nuclear power plants, could do Dubai a world of good.
1. They’d have the power.
2. The waste heat could be used to desalinate water, pretty much as much water as you want.
3. They could build and electrical distribution network and sell the power to Oman and others.
They could use Thorium as their fuel and cut their build costs by 100 fold.
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