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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.
Three of them - the Louvre Abu Dhabi designed by Jean Nouvel, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi designed by Frank Gehry, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum by Norman Foster, are due to be completed by 2012.After that should come a performing arts centre designed by Zaha Hadid (pictured above) and Tadao Ando’s maritime museum.
Details of the development were being shown off to US investors by officials of the Abu Dhabi Tourism Development & Investment Company, which is the developer owned by the Abu Dhabi government.
Abu Dhabi clearly wants to get in on some of the action generated by the frenetic growth of Dubai but is doing so in a gentler, more restrained way. As the UAE’s richest and largest emirate, it can afford to be lower-key.
For the moment, at least, there does not seem to be a residential property crisis in Abu Dhabi. The first 350 homes planned for Saadiyat have just been sold off-plan, with townhouses fetching about $1.8m each.
As yet, foreigners are barred from owning freehold property in the emirate - they can only buy 99-year leases. But it seems likely that Abu Dhabi is going to have to follow Dubai in relaxing the restriction.
Although I took in a little of the breathless expansion when I visited Dubai and Abu Dhabi last year, it remains astonishing to see such vast projects conjured up out of the desert.
I am the FT's chief business commentator and this blog is about business, finance, media, technology and related matters. I live in New York so there is a bias towards US topics but I range more widely. Comments and criticism, which hopefully are at least as interesting as anything I write, are welcome. There is more about me on 
