Last week, when Dubai World requested a "debt standstill" – a polite way of saying, “Sorry, not paying any interest any more” – I wasn't really surprised.
Dubai has hit the economic buffers mainly because it's a vast playground for the rich, that has zero assets, except the slave labour of the workers who've built it.
At almost the same moment as Dubai's debt crisis erupted, American actor Nicholas Cage went broke too. He went broke because he had bought too many castles, too many yachts, too many cars, too many everything. He was a one-man Dubai.
I read in The Financial Times that Royal Bank of Scotland is the most exposed of the UK bank lenders to Dubai. Of course it is.
RBS lent so much money, so profligately, that in the wind-up to the financial crisis, that it became the world’s largest bank (by assets) by a very large margin.
I wonder whether the RBS bankers who are now threatening to resign if their bonuses are blocked, are among those who, doubtless, earned very large bonuses a few years ago for winning the bid to lend to Dubai World.
And to Nicholas Cage: after all, the largest creditor of Michael Jackson's estate is Barclays bank...
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