Do you remember when running away to Dubai was everybody's Plan B? The Persian Gulf statelet, relatively light on oil, invented a boom through sheer hope and flashiness. Now foreigners are fleeing.

With Manhattan's economy in freefall, some thought of emigrating to Dubai, which commanded some obscene percentage of the world's construction cranes. Now construction has halted on the world's tallest skyscraper, just the most visible sign of a property bubble ready to pop. Having spent, spent, spent on condos, cars, and credit cards — and the very real threat of being thrown into debtors' prison — some Westerners are buying one-way tickets home and leaving the Mercedes they can no longer afford in the parking lots of Dubai's international airport.

Dubai was seen as the future of journalism, the future of fashion, even the future of Hollywood — or at least its paparazzi-laden party scene. When Silicon Valley's money machine ground to a halt, Facebook's chief financial officer went there looking for funding last fall. Tellingly, he came back empty-handed.

Was it all just a desert mirage? Dubai is still adding 1,000 work visas a day. But that's down from 2,000 a day a year ago. That will have a major effect on Dubai's economy, since foreign workers make up 90 percent of the emirate's population. And the point of Dubai has never been about steady growth. It has been about taking part in the world's last boomtown, capitalism's final dance. The music is fading.

(Photo of gold-chromed Mercedes via Jalopnik; abandoned Mercedes by Bryan Denton/New York Times)