Around his business associates and his employees Al Zarouni wears the traditional Emirati dishdasha—a white flowing cotton robe and matching headpiece with black band. When I visited, however, he was in shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals, and was sitting on the couch going over the week’s picks, the TV tuned to the Seahawks versus Giants pregame show.

He suggested we take in the view from the backyard. Al Zarouni’s villa looks out to the coastline, where the view is of dozens of skyscrapers and towers and hotels and developments in various stages of erection, the whole of it extravagantly lit and teeming with hundreds of construction cranes. Dubai has the highest concentration of construction cranes in the world, and the sight of them working away on the skyline is not unlike the scene in War of the Worlds where Tom Cruise gets a view of the alien tripods munching away on the city.

“It’s the best view on the palm,” Al Zarouni said. “We bought the place as soon as they announced they were building it. My dad’s uncles and his friends scooped up the rest of the villas on the frond.”

Al Zarouni’s friend Mark Chandler was standing by the pool, crystalline and deep blue. He has been in Dubai for only a year.

“What were you doing before?” I asked.

Susquehanna, known as a trader and marketmaker in stocks and options, has about 250 employees at its main New York City office in lower Manhattan. The midtown office was a satellite operation that housed about 30 bankers and research analysts.

The firm, based in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, has more than 1,500 employees worldwide.

“Earlier this week we changed the focus in our institutional business,” said Eric Noll, SIG’s global head of strategic relationships. “We were trying to provide banking and research to a sector of the market that’s been demolished.”

Susquehanna’s bankers and analysts covered companies in the healthcare and biotech sectors, as well as firms across the Asia Pacific region and PIPEs (private investments in public equity.)

Institutional investors such as mutual and hedge funds have been steering clear of biotech and healthcare companies because the continuing market slump has slashed their market values.

“We don’t feel we were getting good traction with our resources,” Noll said, adding the firm’s analysts and bankers were top notch.

On a smaller scale, Susquehanna’s moves are part of a trend sweeping Wall Street. Investment banks are slashing thousands of jobs in response to shrinking revenue and a breakdown of some once-thriving markets.