There is a strange sensation when you take Highway 1 from Tijuana to Ensenada. There is probably no other place in Mexico where the financial meltdown is so visible and unsettling. Hundreds of houses with a "For Sale" sign, half-built high-rise towers, ripped and empty billboards, and plenty bulldozed areas are a sad monument to the unscrupoulous development fed by the international housing bubble that burst in everybody's face last year.

Of what once was a beautiful coast is a series of ghost towns and unrealized dreams of becoming rich quickly.

And some of those trapped before the bubble burst want their money back. Last March, Donald Trump was sued by more than 60 people who paid about $32 million dollars in deposits just to find out that the luxury oceanfront project was being scrapped and that there was no money left to refund deposits. The lawsuit accuses the New York real estate developer and reality television star of fraud, negligence, unjust enrichment and violating federal disclosure laws.

As Robert Shiller points out in his book Irrational Exuberance, an asset bubble is a sort of natural Ponzi scheme in which people keep making money as long as there are more suckers to draw in. But it seems that the suckers are not rushing to get real estate in the Baja California Higway 1 anymore.

Saul Alarcon