Originally Posted by
hjohnson
If they ever finish the current terminal. WHen I flew DXB in July, the place was a ghost town and the cranes building the new one were just sitting there idle. Dubai's economy is a house of cards. Sooner or later people are going to realize all they do is push money around, rather than actually producing something useful.
Abu Dahbi, on the other hand, still has some oil which is why they were the ones who bailed out Dubai.
Its a financial center that is producing services. The financial crisis had an obvious impact there, but the financial crisis is also beginning to pass now and Dubai has one major advantage insofar as it is becoming a key finance point for Asian companies trying to do business in Africa.
Financial services are "something useful" as Hong Kong and Singapore and other finance centers have shown. What do those two cities produce that Dubai doesn't? The house of cards analogy would have worked in 2008, but seeing the way they've weathered it, I don't think its accurate.