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UAE

Page history last edited by Brian D Butler 15 years, 1 month ago

United Arab Emirates

 

 

Unlike some of its neighbours (especially Abu Dhabi) Dubai’s growth was primarily debt financed, making it more vulnerable to the global liquidity crunch and more local liquidity tightening triggered first by the withdrawal of speculative capital and – later by the fall in the oil price. Although Dubai has little oil, it was clearly a petrodollar recycling hub. It accounted for much of the UAE’s external debt stock (some of Abu Dhabi’s state investors like Mubadala and others accounted for the rest ). Dubai based banks likely also accounted for much of the bank lending to the UAE. Moodys vulnerability indicators show that the UAE is among the most vulnerable in the MENA region (if much less vulnerable that Eastern European countries that are being forced to rapidly and painfully adjust.

 

Dubai is experiencing a property bust. Prices and volumes have been falling for some time and even efforts to control the supply (by merging and providing capital to the main mortgage lenders or pulling back on projects have had limited effect.) The secondary market in particular has dried up. Meanwhile with a number of foreigners losing their jobs will be another blow to consumption and property markets.

 

It has been widely assumed that oil-rich Abu Dhabi would come to Dubai’s aid in one way or another, providing the needed capital and solidifying Abu Dhabi’s role within the power structure of the UAE

 

Standard chartered suggests that UAE banks need an additional $27 billion to be adequately capitalized.

 

read more:  http://blogs.cfr.org/setser/2009/02/17/how-worried-should-we-be-about-dubai/

 

 

Emirates covered in GloboTrends:

see also...

 

 

 

Tech in UAE:

 

Twitter apparently banned in UAE, like many other sites

 

twitterlogo.png

The United Arab Emirates has apparently banned Twitter because its content is “not consistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values” of the country.

 

The report comes from investor Joi Ito, who posted this screenshot (below) on his blog while traveling through the country and experiencing the ban first-hand. He comments here, however, that he was able access Twitter from his hotel and the airport.

 

The UAE has been blocking at least some Twitter users since the summer, according to the Committee to Protect Bloggers.

 

Twitter cofounder Biz Stone says that the company can’t officially confirm the lockout because it isn’t in contact with UAE representatives. He tells us that Twitter is still serving traffic to the region, and that he hasn’t heard any reports that text messaging or instant messaging interaction with Twitter has been impacted.

 

The UAE has also banned a number of popular web services, such as Flickr, Myspace, Skype and YouTube — although some of these sites are no longer banned. Sporadic access to international web services appears to be the norm in the country. Reports of a ban on Facebook also surfaced earlier this year but the site is apparently accessible now.

 

Of course, there’s not always a purely moral rationale behind such bans. The ban on Skype may be to maintain the profits of UAE’s incumbent telelecommunications conglomerate, Etisalat.

People have developed ways of working around such bans in order to access some of these services. If you want to access Flickr, for example, you can use the Firefox plugin that Iranian photographer Hamed Saber released earlier this year. It will let you circumvent the internet filters of any country where the site is banned.

 

twitteruaeban.png

 

 

 

 

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