Both questions came from octogenarians and both illustrate why it is often best to call on the wisdom of the aged rather than rely on the enthusiastic naivety of youth.

Question one came from the Queen as she was opening a new building at the London School of Economics. No one from that self-important academic institution could satisfactorily answer the 82-year-old’s question, which cut to the core of the crisis: “couldn’t someone have seen it coming?”

Question two was from an 81-year-old man at an investment conference attended by Dryblower in September this year. He was someone who had lived a full life, and kept his marbles in the process, and asked: “if it was so bad, how come they’ve fixed it so quickly?”

We will probably never be able to answer the Queen’s question, though every banker and economist in the world should hang his or her head in shame after being nailed by the wisdom of an 82-year-old corgi breeder.

But we do know the answer to the second question about how come the global financial crisis has been fixed so quickly.

It hasn’t.

Dubai is the one-word answer to that question, demonstrated starkly by the announcement late last week that the country cannot repay its debts in an orderly fashion.

Translated, a Gulf state that has indulged in a “finger-down-the-throat” lifestyle of excess is now bankrupt.

Lots of people are searching for an answer to the same question Her Maj asked at the LSE last year.

Yes, someone could have seen it coming. But no one dared speak up lest they rocked the boat and sank the Dubai dream, which has morphed into a nightmare.

Quite simply, Dubai lived beyond its means, with its rulers actually believing that anyone would willingly choose to live in a furnace opposite a nuclear-powered Iran, just down the road from the wreckage of Iraq, and with the US sixth fleet cruising the Gulf with trigger-happy admirals aboard.

Whatever the cause of the Dubai disaster – and Dryblower really doesn’t care, having visited the ostentatious dump a few times and with no plans to ever return – the point for the mining industry is that Dubai is both a rather nasty aftershock from last year’s crash and a reminder that the GFC lingers.

First evidence of Dubai damaging the mining market was apparent within hours of the country’s effective financial collapse.

Clive Palmer, the self-proclaimed richest man in Australia, withdrew his ambitious float of Resourcehouse, a company said to include coal and iron ore mines, but with very little detail about it in the public arena.

Dryblower assumes Clive’s retreat will be temporary, but it is also fair to assume that it might be some time before investors regain the confidence to tip $US3 billion into his business, which is proposed to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Closer to home, there is yet to be a quantified effect of the Dubai insolvency on the 26 companies that have their names before the listing committee of the Australian Securities Exchange, with 21 fitting the “resource float” description and most being mining stocks.

Interestingly, even before the full effect of Dubai’s collapse moves out of the banking sector into the rest of the economy, two of the 21 resource floats have slipped quietly past the listing deadline with the ominous words “to be advised”

Falling back once again on a Dryblower translation, “to be advised” is in the category of “the cheque’s in the mail” or “I’ll love you in the morning” and other euphemisms we invent to avoid the truth, such as “passed away” or “moved to the other side” when “dead” is what you’re trying to say.

Other effects of the Dubai meltdown will be felt, but it is the high-risk areas, such as new mining floats, that will be the first to suffer.

Dryblower hopes his friends behind some of the floats haven’t placed irrevocable orders on new BMWs on the assumption their floats will succeed.

That might prove to be a big oops – though it could lead to a few cheap second-hand Beemers being available in the post-Christmas sales as the promoters are forced to dump their toys.

*Dryblower is a weekly column on ILN’s sister publication MiningNews.net.