Word: dubai
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Saif Ahmed began living the Dubai dream five years ago. Armed with an M.B.A. from the University of Toronto, the Canadian entrepreneur moved to the gulf city-state and co-founded property developer Universal Canlink Inc. By 2006 the firm had annual revenues of $15 million, luring foreign investors with tales of "meteoric" growth in the local property market. Lately, with the global financial downturn spreading to the Middle East, Ahmed has come back to earth. "Before, people were buying blindly, without asking much about the details," he says. "Now such risk takers have disappeared...
Among the signs of the changing mood: Nakheel, the developer of Dubai's proposed 200-story skyscraper, has announced it is reassessing its needs. Boardrooms and coffee shops alike are buzzing with talk about the coming fall. The Cairo-based investment bank EFG-Hermes recently predicted that Dubai property values could tumble 20% in the next three years. Shares of Emaar, a Dubai company that has become one of the world's biggest real estate developers, have fallen almost two-thirds since January...
Nobody is calling it a bust--not yet, anyway. Small to midsize builders like Ahmed are still operating, and 70,000 visitors attended Dubai's Cityscape property show recently, where projects worth some $180 billion were announced. Yet Dubai is vulnerable. As the gulf's business, transportation and tourism hub, it is more entwined with the global economy than many of its neighbors. And Dubai never enjoyed the profits from oil and natural gas that enabled sister emirate Abu Dhabi to amass a vast financial cushion...
...Obama's technician's calm seems extra-attractive," says Hodgman, who believes that jocks vs. geeks has replaced red vs. blue as the reigning cultural conflict of the day. But jockdom, he says, is on the wane. "The world is now driven by knowledge economies. China and India and Dubai do not make Big Bang--theory sitcoms marginalizing their geeks and engineers--unless they actually do, in which case, awesome...
...city's artistic community "accused me of exporting Syrian culture," he says. "There was still this romantic idea that artists have to be poor." Not anymore: prices have risen as much as 1,000%, and top works can command up to $200,000. Ayyam Gallery is expanding to Dubai and Beirut and has an exhibition in New York City. Many buyers aren't megarich Saudi oil princes but wealthy Syrians with newfound avant-garde tastes and an eagerness to promote their culture. "People like to say our culture is thousands of years old, but as a country, we're just...