All during our new century's orgy of debt-driven real estate expansion, currency floated nowhere else on Earth the way it did-with pure, gleaming, world-conquering ardor-in Dubai. The island city-state in the Persian Gulf seemed less like an actual spot on the map than a Christo-style performance-art installation, an open-ended meditation on the many sleek surfaces of the monied life. Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the royal patriarch of the place, had a vision-conveniently spelled out in his 2006 autobiography, My Vision-to make Dubai "the world's number one city for commerce, tourism, and services." The trick would be to leverage all the petrodollars and beguiling debt instruments then sluicing around [...]