RUSH: ‘The Dubai government agency that bought into Deutsche Bank this year said on Monday it was considering investing in US financial services firms affected by the mortgage-market crisis.’ (laughing) The thing is, Dubai could wipe out the debt; they could wipe out the crisis. ‘DIFC Investments, one of the agencies Dubai has used to buy foreign assets, is identifying ‘good opportunities for acquisitions’ in the United States, the governor of the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) said on Monday. Asked whether the targets could include US banks such as Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, Omar bin Sulaiman told Reuters: ‘Without mentioning names we have a track record of taking stakes in banks, with the right partners for management. The price has to be right and the strategy has to be aligned,’ he said. Asked whether it made sense to invest in banks which have taken a hit from the mortgage crisis, he said: ‘Yes, but we are looking at all sectors not just financial sectors.” (laughing) They’re also buying into AMD, you know, which makes computer chips. So now they’re going to be buying into the mortgage crisis perhaps. Now they’re buying into AMD, manufactures chips. (laughing)
We can’t have the Dubai ports deal, we can’t have Dubai Ports World managing some terminals in our ports, but, hey, here’s your laptop, made by Dubai. (laughing) Wonder what kind of spy technology they put in there that you don’t know about. (laughing) You know, seriously, what’s happening in Dubai is fascinating. You remember I was telling you last week that the deal that the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi and Dubai have made with Airbus, $30 billion worth of new jets with Airbus, some A350s, some A380s, Boeing got just a smidgen of the offer. One of the interesting things about that to me, the first interesting thing was that the airline business is a cyclical business and you measure your success in increments of ten years. Because of that, you have to have pretty good strategic marketing in fuel prices, what they’re going to be, fuel supplies, and this sort of thing. If you’re in the airline business and you’re buying up new aircraft, don’t you think that you have to be pretty sure that there’s not going to be any problem coming up with jet A, which relies on fuel? Which, by the way, for those of you in Rio Linda, comes from oil.
We keep hearing about the oil crunch and the oil shortage and this and that. The ChiComs are drinking it all up and in India they’re going to get in the game, too, and all of this doom-and-gloom talk about energy. But the people that are in the jet business keep cranking them out and the people in the flying of the jets business keep buying ’em up. And they don’t run on solar, and they don’t run on windmills on top of the fuselage, and they don’t run on little batteries like in the back of your hybrid.
Second thing about Dubai, and this is a point that I tried to make during the whole controversy over the Dubai Ports deal, and that is, the United Arab Emirates is exploding, business-wise. It is literally exploding. Tiger Woods’ first golf development project will be in Dubai, ditto Ernie Els. In addition to all of that, they are building homes, hotels, rental units, properties, they’re building islands out in the Gulf on which they are building homes and hotels. It’s an amazing thing to see. They’re just rising out of the dust of the desert. This is an ugly desert. I flew over it. This Dubai just pops right out. This is brown. This is not gorgeous sand like you see in Lawrence of Arabia. This just looks like dirt, and the city and all of this stuff is rising out of it, and they’re building it out in the Gulf.
The last thing, the last thing they want is this little nut job in Iran getting nukes. They’re making huge investments. They’re becoming a financial capital of that part of the world for certain, maybe on the way to unseating Hong Kong, and maybe on the way to become a major, major financial capital. They’re looking to be a vacation destination, the premiere vacation destination for people that live on that part of the planet. They’re nine hours ahead of us, so right now it’s coming up on 11 o’clock there at night, 20 minutes to 11. But we can’t have Dubai Ports World running the ports. Halliburton’s gone over there, relocated their headquarters, the oil services business. I just think it’s fascinating to watch, because it’s what we used to be. It’s what we used to be in terms of growth, in terms of ‘we’re going to be it.’ You go back and look what this country did in the Great Depression; can I just give you a list of some things we built during the Great Depression? Now, I know that we needed make-work projects because we needed to give people jobs, but we still had the capital to do it and we had the will. We built both the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, built the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building went up a year early. All of this in the thirties in the Great Depression.
I’ve long been fascinated by the Golden Gate Bridge. I finally got to take a trip when I lived in Sacramento to the top of the South Tower because I’ve always been amazed. You go to Fort Point, which is beneath the South Tower, you stand there, there’s no bridge, say I’m going to build a bridge here, what would I do first? I would have no clue, I’m not an engineer. They didn’t have the high-tech cranes and equipment to build bridges like we do today, and yet they did. In the meantime, the World Trade Center has been a hole in the ground for six years, and it’s not that we can’t build things anymore. Of course we can. We get all caught up in political correctness and the environmentalist liberalism basically putting a roadblock to anything new and progressive that’s technologically advanced. When you see Dubai — and I know they’ve got all kinds of oil money and this sort of thing, but we’re not a poor country. We could have a lot more oil money than we have, if we simply would drill for — (interruption) people died during the building of the Empire State Building. Yeah, people died building the Golden Gate Bridge, too. People die building buildings. Liberals won’t let things get built today because people die, because of oppressive management that will force the workers into unsafe conditions for low wages and no health care. Right, so we don’t build things, or else we have an argument over who’s going to be honored when we build the World Trade Center, and it turns out that the original proposal was to honor nobody, it was to rip the country for all of the indiscretions and oppressions that we have visited over minority populations.