City of Dreams built on Sand

Well i thought the first topic i would write about is what is in the papers today.... DUBAI... yup its sinking and its sinking in Sand.... its nothing new and well no one should be surprised. Dubai is a city of dreams built on Sand. Spiraling under its own debt, crashing real estate and the unreasonable lifestyle of the Sheiks are probably some of the contributing factors of the unrecoverable mess Dubai is in right now...
So lets start with the one think that make the Middle eastern countries more prominent than the other lesser fortunate ones. OIL. The middle eastern countries account for nearly 90pc of Global oil productions. This made the Sheiks rich and they sure did flaunt it by buying fancy cars and bigger palaces. This being the conventional view, Sheik Mohammed (the ultimate ruler of Dubai) had a slightly different vision. One of the reasons being that well lets put it this way, he didnt have as much as a nickel of oil as compared to the other Arab Nations. So he made Dubai, the city of a thousand and one Arabian lights as suggested by Johann Hari (The dark Side of Dubai, Columnist London Independent.
A city was built by luring in cheap laborers from Bangladesh and other 3rd world countries, by promising them a great and money rich future. But all they got in return were their passports seized at the time of entry to Dubai, salvaging all hopes of leaving the city without the consent of the authorities and pushed into labour camps like that of Sonapur, which ironically means the city of Gold in Hindi.
Attracted by the low tax rates, Dubai managed to attract tons of investors globally for real estate and market investments during the boom regime, only to realize that the city will not be able to stop the downward spiraling real estate market during the global recession which hit in the year 2008. Many of the ex pats in Dubai who took additional loans to buy the over hyped houses and islands are now probably imprisoned and not allowed to leave the city, their families have lost all communication with them and probably will for a long time to come.
The disaster that Dubai has created for themselves would for sure be felt by other nations who have direct contact with Dubai as a ripple effect is bound to occur. Take India for instance, 6 of our nationalized banks have major presence in Dubai. Of which Bank of Baroda have the highest number, 6 branches and more than 600cr rupees invested only in the real estate market. It will soon feel like a second wave of Global Recession to hit the Indian markets. Lucky for us we are quite isolated from this all, thanks to the Banking and Monetary policies (will save that for another time).
According to the last statistics there are more than 2 million Malayalees living the Dubai Dream waiting to be shattered. The caption to this article should probably now read a "City built on Dreams, built on Sand".

The Beginning of the End

I have always wanted to start a blog of my own, but never got into the spirit of actually getting down to writing one.... so i guess here i am. My first level of blogging would ideally deal with thinks which I think I am good at which would probably include economics, politics and markets... i am not clamming to be the best there is, but these would be notes on my view points with a little bit of prior research. Also dont mind the spelling mistakes and the correctiveness(if there is such a word) of my language. I am not even sure how often i will be able to have blog entries... but there is no harm starting now.... this is probably the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end... thats to see....