There is a fascinating analysis of how the financial crisis is affecting the United Arab Emirates – including Abu Dhabi and Dubai – in the FT this morning, co-written by Lionel Barber, our editor, who was visiting when a bank bail-out was being crafted.

It makes me think that my recent note on the booming residential property market in Abu Dhabi may have coincided with the top of the market. (I also like the photograph that goes with the article, of Roger Federer playing Andre Agassi on a helipad on top of the Burj Al Arab hotel.)

Indeed, the charts accompanying the piece show that residential property prices rose by 42 per cent between the first quarter of this year and the last quarter of 2007, while the rise from first to second quarter was 16 per cent. That is still zippy but the rate of growth is abating.

The thing that interested me most was the way in which Abu Dhabi, which has most of the UAE’s oil wealth, held its nose and came to the rescue of Dubai, its flashier and more debt dependent fellow emirate when doubts surfaced.

It shows that, even if there are many in Abu Dhabi who look askance at Dubai’s wilder and more thrusting side, the family of emirates came together at the crucial time.

Crises are relative. Another chart with the article records the current account surpluses of Gulf countries, with the UAE’s 22 per cent of GDP surplus this year more than matched by Kuwait (44 per cent) and Qatar (43 per cent).

These surpluses, however, depend to varying degrees on the oil price, which has been in rapid retreat recently. When I was in Dubai last year, the conventional wisdom was that the local economy, which depends heavily on trade in the region, would be fine while oil remained above $40 a barrel.

The futures market is now predicting that oil could reach $50 a barrel by the end of this year, which is getting uncomfortably close.

As an antidote to the property-related crisis sweeping over Lehman Brothers, I went over to the Javitz conference centre in Manhattan yesterday to learn about one property development that is not short of money.

It is Saadiyat Island, the mind-boggling $27bn project to develop an island next to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. At about $1bn per square kilometre, the emirate is not stinting on Saadiyat.

I suppose the falling oil price may crimp the style of Abu Dhabi and its next-door emirate Dubai a little. But it is not stopping the creation of Saadiyat, which will not only have nine resort hotels along a 9 kilometre beach but a cluster of world-class museums.

I have never seen Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, in person so I took the opportunity to do so this lunchtime at the Milken Institute Global Conference. I have to say that I was impressed.

Mr Schwarzenegger was talking about his push to build infrastructure such as roads, rail links and schools in California. He has also linked up with Ed Rendell, governor of Pennsylvania, and Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York to spread that message across the US.

I expected him to be amusing and unusual but he surprised me with his fluency in talking about the topic and his charm. Maybe it helped that he was in a room full of business people (and financiers with an interest in the subject) who were on his side.

I also liked his lack of tact. At one point, eulogising about why his state was “the greatest place in the world” he compared it to other states. “People are not dying to go to Iowa,” he said. I can only imagine the apology he will have to make for that.

I am back in London again to pick up a prize and continue my ongoing comparison of my native city with the one where I live – New York.

As always, when arriving at London Bridge station this morning, I was reminded of T. S. Eliot’s lines from The Wasteland:

Eliot once worked in Lloyds Bank as a clerk. I recall that Sir Jeremy Morse, the former chairman of the bank, had tears in his eyes when he recited those lines from memory in a valedictory speech.

Anyway, this morning they were as true as ever as I pushed through the crowds to board the Jubilee Line. A sign proclaimed that the line service was good but, as Bill Clinton might have said, that depends on the meaning of the word “good”.

Having reviewed Richard Florida’s Whose Your City the other day, I am unusually alert to stories about people flocking to cities from suburbs and the countryside.

So this FT story this morning caught my eye. It is about a McKinsey Global Institute study of urbanisation in China and includes this paragraph:

On top of the existing 103m urban migrants, Chinese cities will face an influx of another 243m migrants by 2025, taking the urban population up to nearly 1bn people. In the medium and large cities, about half the population will be migrants, which is almost three times the current level.

And I thought that Shanghai and Beijing looked crowded already.

I am going to Davos for the World Economic Forum this week and will be blogging from there. If you see me, say hello.

Prompted by Jason Kottke, Steven Johnson and Richard Florida, who have all posted the list of cities they visited in 2007, I looked back to identify my own list. It is as follows:

London
Zurich
Detroit
Cancun
Fort Lauderdale
Beverly Hills
Paris
Santa Monica
Dubai
Abu Dhabi

A couple of thoughts on my list. I was far less well travelled than Mr Florida or Mr Johnson although I gave Mr Kottke a run for his money (he has the excuse of a new baby). I also neglected to go to Asia, which is quite an oversight given the new shape of the world.

But I still like my list. Small, but full of interest. The photo above, by the way, is a shot I took of sunset in the desert outside Dubai.

A final thought (for now) following my visit to the Gulf. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of that strange and unconvincing region, Emea?

Emea stands for Europe, Middle East and Africa. It was popularised by US companies, which tended until recently to lump everything in the time zone around London and Paris together for the sake of geographical and managerial convenience.

Thus, a glance at Google discloses that AT&T, Microsoft and others still count Norway, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe as part of the same place.

This makes bureaucratic sense, in an Orwellian kind of way. I don’t mean totalitarianism but the fact that the world in 1984 was divided into Oceania, Eastasia and Eurania. Emea similarly allows multinational corporations to categorise the world into the Americas, Asia and that bit in between.