The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or maybe not. The global economic slowdown is, like the debt-fuelled boom, creating a herd mentality amongst investors and regulators. Ok, so there haven’t been any reports of people jumping off buildings on Wall Street. Banks fell, but not people, a bit different from the grim times of 1929 and the Wall Street Crash.

Film-maker Roger Graef wrote on the BBC News website about what happened to his grandfather. “I know that 1929 was very chaotic. My grandfather was in insurance. He had investments that all went south and he committed suicide by jumping off a roof. When every man jumps out of a window there is no satisfaction at all. All you can say is poor bastard he actually believed the myth that it was all going to be alright and someone else was going to protect him. And didn't.”

Maybe the big government bailouts have prevented a recurrence of those kinds of acts in the past couple of years, but we now find ourselves almost back at square one. The regulators want to punish those who created the situations that led to all the speculation, but at the same time, weak economies mean that they are afraid. It’s a Catch 22 situation. Crime without punishment, it would seem.

Mind you, Dubai appears to be making a move in the right direction. It has been frequently in the news as one scandal after another involving fraud has tarnished the emirate’s reputation as a business friendly location. Now it seems that it wants to be seen to be hard, but fair.

A senior manager at Istithmar World, the overseas investment arm of Dubai World, was given five years behind bars after reportedly embezzling $1.3 million. The half decade stretch is being seen as a bit of a landmark case in the region. The guilty Briton was also fined $2.7 million.

Will more such cases and tougher sentencing follow in other parts of the Middle East and most importantly, will the cases be seen as free and fair? Fraud might scare investors away, but the idea of unfair trials and an opaque and archaic legal system is just as bad as lax regulations and a lack of transparency.

Dubai may have set an important precedent in the aforementioned case. It could do something to draw wary investors back. Will places like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon and Egypt, for instance, do the same? Hopefully.

Incidentally, Nina Shen Rastogi, writing on the slate.com pointed out that between Black Thursday and the end of 1929, only four of the 100 suicides and suicide attempts reported in the New York Times were plunges linked to the crash, and only two took place on Wall Street. (There were some crash-related suicides that didn't involve fatal jumps: The president of County Trust Co. and the head of Rochester Gas and Electric both killed themselves, but they used a gun and gas, respectively.)

Now you know.