No Thanksgiving for investors: Dubai's debt woes rattle stocks around the globe

Thursday is one of those days when I wish I could be reincarnated as Jon Stewart. I am certainly hoping that when he returns to live broadcasts, he can find the funny in the media's obsessive coverage of the State Dinner crashers. And if he does this, he should note that while the media salivated over the Salahis, it ignored a far more important story -- Middle Eastern petro-state, Dubai, was defaulting on its debt.

Problems with Dubai's finances are not a big surprise. As I posted in February, I first got wind of the potential for a huge collapse there back in 2005 when I read an article in the New Yorker which discussed Dubai's world record breaking pace of commercial real estate development as its government sought to diversify away from oil.

And Dubai is perhaps just one extreme example of a bigger problem. As I've posted, the $6.7 trillion commercial real estate lending industry has been dangling out there as the potential cause of a double dip economic contraction. But I did not anticipate that Dubai's inability to repay its debts would be the straw that would break the back of commercial real estate.