LARRY ROIBAL

Ball point pen on the morning newsprint

With over 40% of Dubai’s office space empty, the emirate’s debt to GDP ratio standing at 148%, and Abu Dhabi’s recent bailout of the emirate on the verge of bankruptcy, Dubai opened the world’s most ostentatious building. Over half a mile tall, it stands as a monument to all that went wrong in the last decade. A half mile seems like an abstract height for a building. To put it in perspective, the Eiffel Tower still stands as the tallest structure in Paris at 1,063 feet tall. Until yesterday, the tallest building in the world was Taipei 101, in Taiwan, nearly 2/3rds taller than the Eiffel Tower, it’s 1,671 feet tall. Now, If you stack both structures on top of one another, you begin to understand how tall the Burj Dubai Tower stands at 2,717 feet tall….Uhg.

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Ball point pen on the morning newsprint

The United Arab Emirates claim to be one country, but the religious, oil rich Abu Dhabi and it’s current emir, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan seem hesitant to step in and bail out the secular, upstart Dubai, leading many to speculate about a rift between the two emirates. Dubai’s reported debt now stands at 148% of it’s GDP.

Ball point pen on the morning newsprint

An unprecedented construction boom, down turn in the economy and real estate markets, and the world-wide banking crisis, has caused the heavily leveraged, secular Dubia to seek help from the conservative, religious and financially sound big brother, Abu Dhabi. Stay tuned.