It looks as though the regional stock markets are going to take a bit of a tanning this week in the wake of the announcement that Dubai is currently short of a few bob to pay its credit bills next month.

It was certainly a bit naughty of that proud little emirate to announce that it was having problems with around $60 billion of its debts on a day that coincided with the beginning of Eid Al Adha and the closure of the US stock markets for Thanksgiving.

There were certainly quite a few Americans who felt anything but thankful as they ate their turkey on Thursday, not least the doom and gloom merchants who immediately started predicting that the collapse of Dubai would send the global economy back into recession.

Their predictions are of course nonsense and I imagine in a matter of weeks the problems Dubai faces will have been written off as a little local difficulty.

Since I first came to the Middle East some seven years ago I have been listening to people predicting the collapse of Dubai.

It was always the case that there was, sooner or later, going to be a correction in its booming property markets and it was just unfortunate that it coincided with a global credit crisis.

Now, partly as a result of the fall in property prices in Dubai and a slowdown in Dubai World's other global activities, the emirate has run into some short-term debt funding problems.

But the bottom line is that the real problem is it has to find $4bn pretty quickly to meet some bond repayments.

Now no one is going to tell me that $4bn is a lot of cash, even for a small state like Dubai.

And the idea that the want of $4bn is going to send the world economy into decline is risible.

To put it in context you have to remember that the gross domestic product of our planet runs to something like $30 trillion while the global debt market is worth, I believe, somewhere north of $100trn.

So Dubai's short-term funding problem is pretty small potatoes, not least at a time when none of its creditors is exactly calling for blood.

Dubai World's problem appears to be that the current economic slowdown has meant that its revenue stream has slowed down while the value of its assets has fallen, particularly its local property assets.

But these are all things that will bounce back.

The global property market is already recovering and Dubai World holds rather a lot of top class property in both London and the US, not to mention an Open Championship golf resort in Scotland.

And this summer the Queen Elizabeth 2, which the company also owns, will be making money hand over fist in South Africa where it will be a floating hotel for the world's richest football fans at the World Cup.

There is no suggestion that Dubai World is lumbered, like Lehman Brothers, with billions of toxic assets.

It is more the case that it would prefer a moratorium on debt repayment rather than have to liquidate assets in what could end up being a fire sale.

In spite of humming and hawing a bit it looks likely that Abu Dhabi will come up with some cash for its neighbour, though it may want to buy up some of the emirates assets at the same time.

Given that they are sitting on a single sovereign wealth fund worth some $500 billion, plus a few smaller funds as well, it is hardly going to put much of a hole in their pocket to come to the aid of Dubai.

And even with the historic rivalry between these two states it will ultimately be in Abu Dhabi's interest to see a healthy economy rather than a burst bubble 70km up the road.

Dubai World, on its website, claims to be an organisation on which the sun never sets.

In the current situation it may well be a good idea for Dubai to look at its investment portfolio and perhaps offload some of its assets to provide it with the short-term liquidity it needs to get it through the next couple of years.

An odd feast...

T

hanksgiving in the US always strikes me as an odd kind of holiday.

The one good thing about Thanksgiving is that Americans tend to hold off on Christmas shopping until after this annual feast.

Which means they do not have to contend with Christmas decorations in all the shops for as long a period as the Brits.

I was back home last month and the tinsel and trees were already appearing in the high street.

So perhaps the Brits should start celebrating thanksgiving as well.

This peculiar US holiday is supposed to celebrate the Pilgrim Father's first harvest after they arrived from Britain.

Exactly what they were harvesting on the US eastern seaboard at the end of November is anyone's guess as, unless there has been an awful lot of global cooling over the past 300 years or so, it seems an unlikely time of year to be bringing in the corn.

And as I recall from studying history they did not manage much planting and sowing in their first year but instead, spent most of their time eating all the salted beef and other produce they brought with them from the old country.

They did not do much fishing, on the grounds that none of them had any experience as fishermen, and they did not do much farming as very few of them were horny handed sons of the soil.

These settlers were a pretty motley bunch of middle class folk who could not actually do very much for themselves and it fell to the native Americans who fed them and showed them how to farm and how to fish.

You can bet it was a native American who caught the turkeys for the first Thanksgiving celebration.

And to thank the natives for this help, these people produced a new generation of Americans who duly stole the land and committed the grossest act of genocide in the history of the world.

But they don't think about that on Thanksgiving Day. They think about getting out to start the Christmas shopping on Friday.