This morning dear readers, you find your humble correspondent in Abu Dhabi.

It’s been some six years since I was last in the Middle East & certainly my last visit comprised nothing more that three hours respite in the transit lounge a Dubai airport i.e. a bout of remorseless drinking in between two long flights that funnily enough seemed to comprise an obscene amount of drinkie-poos from the trolley. So anyway, here we all are, in a series of meetings that will at very very least, take us around the Gulf until Wednesday lunchtime.

Of course, commercial confidences preclude me ‘fessing up’ to my nefarious little plan suffice to say that the job I was sent to Hong Kong to do has completely turned on its head & the grande fromage has flown out from London to try & understand why exactly, instead of shipping boatloads of bish bosh back to dear Blighty, I have the buying hat on … just as the Asian bourses start to do a Kittinger. Its not that in commercial terms, deals in Asia can get flipped on their head in a nano-second, but as Old China Hands know, a Hong Kong Minute is a bit like the proverbial New York Minute … just a whole load faster.

So, today could be a little bit of a Day of Reckoning. At the moment I am not going to be sure if it’s a case of “somebody’s going to emergency & somebody’s going to jail”, but if the creek don’t rise, the dam don’t burst & at least one wheel stays on the global economy for just a few more weeks…