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Is Dubai poised to become the Iceland of the Middle East? The news dripping out of the most populous city of the United Arab Emirates has been bad for months and worse is coming.
All of the factors that have so blighted Western economies are high on the Dubai checklist: rapid growth on the back of a property boom - tick, rampant lending to speculative borrowers - tick, takeovers built on debt - tick, blind optimism that the good times would never end - tick.
Lately, many thousands of Westerners who headed there in search of a better life have been returning home - some of their own volition, some because the company they work for has faced up to reality and started cutting back.
Last month Andrew Blair, a construction project manager from Bristol, made the news when he responded to being fired from his Dubai job by scrawling his mobile-phone number on the boot of his Porsche, advertising his availability for work. The advert led to him landing a job fitting out a restaurant - which will help him pay the 37 car-related fines he reportedly owes to the authorities.
Others have not been so lucky.
The Dubai Trump Tower is just one of many high-profile construction projects that have been put on hold. One piece of research says $582 billion worth of deals are currently "suspended" across the UAE, with serious doubt about how many will ever reopen.
Yesterday, it emerged that Goldman Sachs has recalled its most senior finance man from Dubai, just a year after he arrived. Officially, Alasdair Warren was needed back home to cope with a glut of moneyraising by UK clients. But that does reveal that he had rather less activity to advise on in the Middle East.
Late last year, Morgan Stanley got rid of 15 of its 110-strong Dubai office. Most banks have cut their Dubai numbers by at least 10% and more cuts are coming, if calls to headhunters are to be believed.
Nearly all of the recent news has been grim. A few weeks ago Moody's said it would probably cut the credit rating for some of Dubai's most prominent state-backed companies including global port operator DP World. Moody's said it made the decision mostly because of the deterioration in Dubai's economic outlook.
Banks that underpinned Dubai's six-year real estate boom are facing the prospect of huge mortgage defaults from overstretched borrowers - many of whom are speculators looking to cash in on property prices that they assumed would keep rising. Chris Dommett of mortgage broker John Charcol Dubai says: "The possibility of mortgage defaults and property foreclosures is a very serious problem."
Analysts say that one issue for Dubai's banks is that they have no experience of dealing with this - they simply do not know when to pull the plug and cut losses. UK banks have many faults, but they are at least used to taking on to the books property they may not be able to sell for years.
So how bad is it? Getting locals to talk about the true state of play isn't easy. Expatriates who are quoted in the media being disparaging about Dubai's prospects fear, with some reason, they will be deported. Local officials, when asked for comment, tend to give replies like this: "Dubai's economy has always been dynamic and resilient and this is mainly due to the great leadership of the country that managed over the last few decades to turn every challenge into an opportunity." Right.
Some history: back in 1975, oil accounted for 64% of Dubai's economy - but unlike its neighbours, it is not home to significant oil reserves. For the area to flourish, it needed a different plan.
A leisure-playground with a financial services sector attached was envisaged - a place where financiers, footballers and their WAGs could escape real life. Bankers would fly in on holiday and find themselves surrounded by people with whom they could do business, went the theory.
Two years ago Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, pictured below left, vowed to make the emirate "a pioneering global city" that would be "free of the direct influence of oil-price fluctuations". The hope was to build the first non-oil economy emirate, to show that the region could still succeed even when the black stuff runs out.
GDP growth of 11% a year was targeted - frothy by any measure. Last year it managed 6.4%. This is still high, but critics say it was never sustainable, that ambition got the better of prudence.
Some of the deals Dubai did to buy overseas companies seem to have been powered by whim rather than thought. One senior banker in Dubai who asked not to be named said: "Dubai was fuelled as much by cheap debt as the UK and US. Things like the acquisition of P&O by DP World had nothing to do with strategy. These deals were done because banks were prepared to lend them billions of cheap debt. DP World could leverage up the target, float it, and make massive profits. Banks aren't lending any more."
Last month, Dubai International Capital, which went on a buying spree in Europe with acquisitions such as Tussauds, fired its chief executive, announced it wasn't making any more overseas investments in Europe and retrenched to its home market.
The banker added: "The Dubai story happened in three stages. In the first, Western banks simply hired as many people as possible in the local market to gain kudos. Then they ran out of money so started redeploying people who had no use in their home markets. Now, they are making people redundant. Long-term, the Middle East is an essential market to be in, but in the short and medium term, banks have a problem."
Unlike Dubai, near neighbour Abu Dhabi has a sovereign wealth fund built on oil billions which it can run at a deficit to ride out the crisis. There's some talk Abu Dhabi will come to Dubai's rescue, but it has its own problems due to the slumping oil price. It's an open question whether it could even afford to bail out its sister's troubled banks.
For Dubai, where the stock market is down 70%, the future looks rocky. The best parties always lead to the biggest hangovers. Dubai was partying hard.
