I assumed months ago that Dubai was headed for the Big Fall - an incredibly indebted nation building all these swank high-end hotels and other facilities, based on the implicit assumption that the oil boom was going to go on forever. A monument to the Bubble.
Besides, the major flaw in trying to turn Dubai into a World Financial Center was that Dubai may look pretty enticing if you live in Saudi Arabia, but not so much if you live in New York or London. They were having real problems convincing high-end financial types that they wanted to live in Dubai. (Today, of course, a lot of unemployed financiers would happily live in Dubai, but the jobs are no longer there.)