Credibility gap

Citigroup has hammered Société Générale, saying its recently-discovered $7 billion fraud has threatened the bank's entire credibility. The financial industry might like to imagine the French bank's current difficulties can be kept local. They won't.

The singular actions of Jérôme Kerviel, the French trader currently being questioned by French police, threaten to damage the reputation of the entire finance industry – from banks, to advisors to credit rating agencies - at least in consumers' eyes. The SocGen debacle comes less than six months after Northern Rock, a British bank, failed, and within the same 12-month period that US banks realized they had botched their bet on the sub-prime market. To the man in the street, the banking industry looks like it is run by buffoons.

Credibility is all.

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Camp Fortune

Aldar Properties is to construct two residential cities for its workers. The two projects are expected to complete in 2010 and will eventually house 150,000 laborers.

"We are committed to provide respectable living conditions for workers ensuring security and safety," says Aldar Chairman Ahmed Ali Al Sayegh. "We believe that the company's progress is attributed partly to the labourers who work hard in our projects. For our part, we provide them with facilities and first-class services along with transportation to move them from the residential compounds to work sites."

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Early contender for Quote of the Year

"A lord with billions in Great Britain cleans his own car on a Sunday morning, whereas people of the Gulf look for someone to hand them a glass of water from just a couple of meters away."

So speaks Majid al-Alawi, Bahrain's labor minister, quoted in Asharq Al-Awsat. Fond of the colorful quote, he says the Gulf is in danger of being swamped by an "Asian tsunami" of expat workers because locals are too "lazy" and "spoilt" to do simple tasks themselves, and that the threat is "worse than the atomic bomb or an Israeli attack".

I've heard these sentiments expressed several times in expat hostelries, but hadn't expected it from a government minister.

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AdLand's warped reality

It is a dangerous science reading too much into the world imagined by the advertising industry. If aliens were to land on earth and catch a five minute ad-break they would conclude human teeth are white and straight, credit is easy to come by, and drinking soft drinks causes people to sing and dance.

We accept the ad industry sells us a fantasy, but that shouldn't mean it loses touch with the real world. Middle East advertising asks consumers to suspend their grip on reality. The industry appears to have drawn up some very strange rules.

• Maids must be invisible. No family will be seen to employ a maid.

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