My colleague Martin Wolf has addressed the guilty plea of the NatWest Three to wire fraud, possibly in return for serving jail sentences in Britain, with a spendidly coruscating attack on the plea bargaining in the US judicial system.

I have nothing to add but I am intrigued by the notion of wire fraud, which crops up all the time in US white-collar crime cases such as the recent conviction of Conrad Black. It has always seemed odd to me that the US treats wire fraud and mail fraud as separate offences from fraud itself, as if the method by which the crime is committed trumps the crime itself.

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Oh dear. There is an ominous story in the FT today about Porsche and its finance director Holger Härter, who has pepped up the treasury operations of the German car maker and taken out various hedges against currency risks, notably the decline of the dollar.

The stubbled Mr Härter is apparently basking in the admiration of journalists, one of whom asked him if he was "a financial genius" at Porsche’s results press conference on Wednesday. He told my colleague Richard Milne that Porsche had adopted a complex trading strategy involving "options on options on options", adding prudently that Porsche is "not interested in speculation".

Well, yes, but currency trading and hedging is a zero sum game and I shudder when I hear of creative Treasury management at industrial companies or public institutions.

Mr Härter should recall the debacle in Orange County. Or, for that matter, take a look at Norway where four towns have suffered from investing in complex US-linked debt securities sold to them by Terra Securities. When big banks offer you innovative financial instruments, beware.

Jim Surowiecki, the astute financial columnist of the New Yorker, wrote an article that I admired in Wired magazine five years ago, arguing that the US approach to technology standards for mobile phones was superior to that of Europe.

Essentially, Surowiecki said that the European approach of mandating a single technology standard in GSM had shut down technological progress, while the US decision to allow GSM to compete with other standards, including CDMA, had allowed the best technology to win.

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OK, so it did not take me long to break my promise about not writing any more about my Gulf visit. But I have an excuse: Abu Dhabi’s convenient decision to invest $7.5bn in Citigroup a week after I visited the emirate.

That is the subject of my newspaper column this week. I conclude that Americans should be thankful that Gulf countries want to recycle their energy revenues back into risk capital. You can read the rest of it here and post any comments below.

A belated note about Kindle, Amazon’s new e-book reader, which was launched last week.

I am less interested in the product itself than some of the reaction to it, which was an example of the abuse the inner circle of technology and media bloggers metes out to anything that does not fit its vision of how the world ought to work. There is a good review of some of the comments here on the FT Tech Blog, written by my colleagues in Silicon Valley.

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The misuse of language in business is so common that I usually let it pass but I was provoked this morning on walking into the FT’s office in midtown Manhattan by a poster for Brite Smile, a tooth whitening group (I will leave on one side the mis-spelling of "bright").

The poster is for $399 tooth veneers, and the tag line is: The First Affordable Veneers.

If these are the first affordable veneers, it implies that nobody was able to afford veneers until now. This claim is patently false, as a glance around the gleaming choppers at any Manhattan cocktail party will tell you.

What Brite Smile means, presumably, is not "affordable" but "cheap", just as retailers talk about "value" products, as in "value for money" or . . . cheap. There is a defence for the euphemism "value" in that it is vague rather than clearly incorrect.

It reminds me of the signs you sometimes find on British motorways saying "Delays possible until June 2008" as if, after that date, delays will be impossible. Sadly, that is also false.

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.

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My epiphany about the Gulf state of Dubai came one night last week in the Souk Madinat Jumeirah. I was standing in the local franchise of Trader Vic’s, the Californian Hawaiian-themed bar, with a Mai Tai cocktail in hand, watching people dance to a salsa band.

I was with a bunch of visitors and locals, some of them consultants at McKinsey & Co, which has a large office in Dubai, as have many European and US banks and legal firms. One of the group was from Spain, another from Venezuela and a third from South Africa. Rounding it out were Americans whose parents were variously born in Jordan, Pakistan and Taiwan.

It felt as if I had died and gone to expatriate heaven.

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There is an economic phenomenon known as “asymmetrical information”, which occurs when one party to a transaction has more information than the other.

I experienced an extreme version of this, although one that was eventually corrected, in the carpet souk in Abu Dhabi this weekend.

Having spent most of last week in Dubai and having a couple of days to kill before today’s FT/DIFC conference, I decided to drive down to Abu Dhabi to take a look at the largest emirate of the United Arab Emirates.

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Column on Financial Times comment page

It is only halfway through November but I think we can already declare the winner of the 2007 Quote of the Year competition. It is Chuck Prince, the former chairman and chief executive of Citigroup.

“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing,” Mr Prince told the Financial Times on July 10.

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