I have always thought the Big Building or Big Arena theory is true. When you see too many football stadiums with huge sponsorships that do not make any sense then start worrying when you see to many empty office skyscrapers being built its also time to worry. I have always wondered about the Devon Building in OKC as it sits in a city with so many already empty vacant offices. I feel they wasted too much money on that. But let’s look at Saudi Arabia.
Economists love to play with all sorts of outlandish indicators of impending economic collapse including bread prices and milk prices, prices of microchips, even the rates currently being charged by escorts in an attempt to pinpoint the time and place where the next economic meltdown will take place. Because the volume of data potentially affecting macroeconomics is so enormous, there is an infinite number of ways a skilled mathematician can rationalize the predictive model of their choosing no matter how wild it may seem.
A trend has established itself within industrialized nations for more than 140 years now and has managed to repeat itself multiple times through some of the 20th and 21st centuries’ darkest economic hours. This would be the Skyscraper Index where the location of the world’s current tallest building under construction is where financial ruin is coming next or has already arrived. Think about it.
Take a look at some of the past examples:
The Equitable Life Building, finished in New York in 1873, coincided with a 5-year recession.
The Empire State Building first broke ground in 1930 but was planned well before Wall Street crashed in 1929 and was built as the world sank into the Great Depression.
The World Trade Center and the former Sears Tower were both built around the time of the oil crisis in the early ’70s. [Read more…]