The whole GFC (or Global Financial Crisis for those lucky people not in the know), has reverberated through the media with as many points of view as climate change.
A few months after we arrived we heard plenty of stories about Dubai being in a whole lot of trouble. We hoped it wasn’t on account of moving here. Despite all the gloom and doom of the time, most of it was deflected. Not just from the local media which finds it impossible to publish a negative story, but also from the international press which first broke the “story”.
But over the last few weeks there has been a new scale of concern across the Emirate we now call home. Stories broke in the UK about the failure of Dubai World, and the almost inconceivable debt levels. The news is now impossible to refute as it’s made its way to our local media.
The newspapers still find plenty of positive stories about the refinancing and ongoing success of the region. While the radio news doesn’t hide the severity at all.
Plenty of news exists about this around the web. The following article though which was sent to me provides a little insight from an expatriate perspective. While I don’t choose to totally subscribe to it, it provides an interesting and worrying possibility.
equally we were all united in the hope that Dubai’s unique economic, cultural and social experiment should be allowed to continue
The Guardian (6 December 2009)
http://m.guardian.co.uk/?id=102202&story=http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/29/dubai-world-desert-gulf-investors
http://snipurl.com/tl3c6