Dubai Is Bouncing Back

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Chatting with pal +Ashish Panjabi on Twitter... hang on a second. I just typed Ashish's twitter handle - @apanjabi - into the blogger CMS and it suggested his Google+ handle instead and replaced the text for me. That's getting way too spooky, Google - and surely in your bid to MAKE us love Google+ and adopt it over all other religions you're now crossing the 'do no evil' rubicon. When you use Gmail and write 'I've attached a photo of your bottom' and forget to attach anything, Goog comes back and asks you if you're sure you want to do that. It's part cutesy, part useful and part scary. But linking everyone I know's social profiles to Google+? That's just plain scary.

Anyway, back to the point. Ashish was complaining about the traffic on floating bridge on Twitter this morning and used a memorable phrase as we chatted about the situation: 'Dubai is bouncing back'. It's not really news as such, the signs are there for all to see. But in black and white, the text sort of hit me.

On the one hand, bouncing back is no bad thing. There's little doubt the UAE has been the best place in the world to be over the past few years - sure, it's been quieter around here, but there has still been opportunity and trade goes on. Modern Dubai was founded on trade and once we'd got rid of the estate agents, it was trade that saw the city through. You forget these things, but compiling blog posts for Fake Plastic Souks The Glory Years took me right back there to 2008 and the overheated Dubai that preceded the GFC.

You couldn't get a school for your kids. You couldn't move in the city, the roads were a constant jam of snarling, honking traffic. The sewage plants were so over-capacity they were digging holes in the desert to store the stuff and tanker drivers were pumping it into storm drains so the sea off Jumeirah was fouled with human sewage and people were getting sick. The power network was straining. You couldn't get into a hospital and the machine that goes ping had a waiting list. Rents were sky-high, Gulf News weighed 1.4Kg - most of which was adverts charging us to dare to dream and live to love - and the city was filled with pop-eyed yahoos getting drunk and boasting how much money they had. Anything that didn't move had a billboard tacked on it. Hotels made up insane lists of demands before taking a booking - including minimum stays and cash up front for event facilities - if you could get one beyond six months in advance. Taxis wouldn't stop for you or wouldn't take the fare if it didn't suit them. If you could find one. There was a constant miasma over the city, a yellow, sulphurous dust cloud you could see as you approached from inland, a great smudge across the horizon. This had become a really unpleasant place to live.

Now there's no doubt that Dubai's in better shape today, having continued to invest in infrastructure during the lean years. The Al Khail Road's been quietly finished, the new road network around Trade Centre Roundabout's well on the way, Defence Roundabout is an interchange, the metro's up and running and so on. Presumably (hopefully) similar investments in other key infrastructure have been taking place, allowing the city to expand once again but do so in a more prepared and planned way - a more sustainable, manageable growth. Because we've learned the lessons from the boom and bust - particularly from the bust - haven't we? If so, then all well and good. We can Bounce Back all we like.

But if we're talking a return to the excess and insanity of 2008, I fear. I fear for this little city I have come to call home - although it's not home and doesn't mind reminding me of the fact now and then. And the reappearance of daft real estate ads, the talk of 22% price rises and jams on Floating Bridge make me very skittish indeed.

Of course, Gulf News will never be 1.4Kg again. The Internet's seeing to that. So there's no point in using its weight to chart the economy's rise as was possible to chart its fall...

Slim

Image via Wikipedia

As various posts over the past eight or so months have noted, Gulf News has been cutting back on the carbs and has dropped its weight from a rather turgid 1.3Kg in November 2008 to an average 640g in Feb 2009, a downward trend continued through May, which saw the paper taking up regular exercise and slimming down to an reasonably regular 540g.

It's been feeling lighter recently and I have generally resisted the mildly obsessive impulse to weigh it again, but today's edition felt noticeably more feather-like. And it is - thanks to my trusty weighing scale (the best Dhs19 I've spent at Lal's in a long time) I can report that today's GN is weighing in at 440g, something like a third of its original weight. I have to add the usual caveat - a Dhs19 scale is hardly capable of atomic accuracy.

I think we can all agree there's a trend here - it's hardly rocket science. The fact that the trend is continuing is a worry, though. GN has already apparently shed a number of journalistic jobs - albeit fudging this news with an example of corporate responsibility and transparency that should inform any company wishing to call the skeleton in the cupboard a 'new market opportunity'. Few will welcome the news of more to come.

Recession? What recession?

Image via Wikipedia

Gulf News is weighing in at something like (don't forget I'm using a Dhs19 scales from Lal's, so I can't really do the old atomic level measurements here) 540g these days, down from 1.3 Kg in November 2008 - and also down from the 640g-odd that it had sort of settled down to in February.

It peaks and troughs a bit, but it's been steadily trending down - the majority of the loss has, of course, been in the enormous volumes of clamorous and directive real estate advertising that last year was telling us to 'Live your dreams' and 'Dare to drivel' and whatnot.

At the same time, Al Nisr Publishing's Property Weekly (Al Nisr is GN's parent company) has dropped again from 72 pages to 66 - from a high of over 144 pages last year.

I take no pleasure in recording this. I have pals at Gulf News & PW and the newspaper has been my constant companion in over 15 years' living in the UAE. I'm rather fond of it, in a strange way.

But it's interesting, perhaps, for those who thought the worst was over in Jan/Feb and that we'd bottomed with the great Q1 shock, to see that the market's still losing value and that real estate advertising (and, arguably, advertising across the board) continues to shrink.

Disclaimer. This article is in no way intended to damage the economy or indeed to provoke any other economic affect beyond a mild look of passing interest between dunking the first and second Rich Tea biscuit in one's morning tea. No acarpi were harmed in the production of this post.

Sign of the Times (Redux)

I can't even begin to match Seabee's world-straddling picture story scoop. But I did think that this was yet another sign of the times, albeit perhaps a little more creative. And it did make us grin when we got it in the office...

Delighted to extend the reach of the campaign!!!

Compassion

The Waterford Wedgewood factory in Kilbarry, Co. Waterford in Ireland, is to shut down.

Some 480 of the plant's workers were told they would lose their jobs by receiver Deloitte Ireland. According to the UK's Telegraph (as well as Sky News and others), the news was received by the workers in a text message.

Hang on. WTF?

Yup. The receiver sent a text. I wonder what it said? 'Could all those with jobs please take one step forward? Where are you going, mate?' or perhaps, 'For you, Paddy, ze work is over.' or maybe, 'Now lads, look here, dere's no point beatin' about de bush. Ye's laid off good an' proper and there's not a ting ye can do about it, like.'?

The workers have occupied the plant in protest and scuffles broke out yesterday with private security guards.

One commentator on the Sky News website put it quite nicely: "I'm disgusted and sickened to see how the workers were treated. It was such a sneaky and underhand way to treat people. The tv coverage of the security guards using such force bashing a worker's head through the toughened glass doors that the glass broke while another security guard tried to block the tv camera from showing it was sickening to watch."

The irony of smacking a redundant glass blower's head through a window is considerable.

I have been through a company receivership: many years ago, the first publishing company I ever worked for went bust. The memory of the scrubbed, shiny and self-satisfied face of the receiver poking out of his too-small collar as he smugly talked down to us all is still with me. I still have the cheque from the Royal Bank of Scotland for £0.69 in full settlement of my £800 outstanding expenses bill at the time of the closure.

But at least the bastard couldn't dismiss us all by text message. A new generation of bastards can, though. The very people that are behind the problem, that are clapping themselves on the back with $18.4 billion in bonuses as they ask for $700 billion to bail out the sector, are the people cutting off credit lines, winding up companies and clamping down on outstandings. Gulf News (700g) reports Obama's excellent reaction to the bonus news, BTW.

They have learned nothing from this and likely will learn nothing. Because the pain is being felt by other people.

I'd like to think that companies like Deloitte will be held accountable for their lack of respect and compassion. I suspect that I am being naive, but leave me to my naivete. Strangely, I take comfort from it.