Leveraged desert real estate (squared)

Dubai’s government, which owes its (now diminished) fortune to a leveraged bet on real estate in the Gulf, decided to diversify by, well, making another leveraged bet on desert real estate.

And Dubai World’s investment in Las Vegas’ real estate doesn’t seem to be working out so well ...

Suffice to say that Dubai would have been better off now if hadn’t sunk $4.3 billion into the troubled Vegas City Center project. It could currently use some of those funds to sort out its own problems.