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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: philv who wrote (4625)	4/19/2004 12:06:01 PM
From: Carlos Blanco	Respond to of 116555

A picture is worth a thousand words, and looking at these astounding images of modern Shanghai makes me wonder if Roach is a little too dismissive of China's economic sustainability i'd tend to look at those as red flags. there's been quite a bit of research correlating tall building construction and tops in business cycles... ---------- In a 1999 report, Andrew Lawrence, a director at the securities firm Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, crystallized the megalophobe worldview when he proposed a Skyscraper Index correlating economic crises with completion of the world's tallest buildings. The Singer (1908) and Metropolitan Life (1909) buildings marked the depression of 1907-1910. Three of Manhattan's greatest corporate landmarks -- 40 Wall Street (1929), the Chrysler Building (1930) and the Empire State Building (1931) -- coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression. The pattern: Giant buildings go up, markets go down. The energy crisis and speculative fever of the early 1970s saw the World Trade Center (1972-1973) and Sears Tower (1974). And the construction of the Petronas Tower in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1997 signaled the onset of the Asian economic crisis. (Looking ahead, Lawrence also pointed ominously to the planned completion of the 1,509foot Shanghai World Financial Center sometime around 2003.) Outstanding exceptions, however, make the Skyscraper Index inconsistent, notably the 792-foot Woolworth Building, the earliest true icon of the genre, which was finished in a prosperous 1913. More convincing than the cyclical argument is the organizational critique. Megalophobes propose that giant structures signal the onset of corporate decadence, like the oversize diamond stickpins in the cravats of Thomas Nast's jowly villains. As early as the 1950s, the historian C. Northcote Parkinson noted that monuments like St. Peter's Basilica and Versailles were completed only after the Papacy and the French monarchy had passed their respective peaks. And indeed, the AT&T building went up shortly before the company's breakup; the Sears Tower as discount chains were rising; the IBM building in the twilight of the mainframe era; and Union Carbide's Connecticut headquarters on the eve of the Bhopal tragedy. On an even greater scale, a new Houston skyline arose just before the 1980s collapse of OPEC, becoming "seethrough" buildings by the early 1990s. --------- findarticles.com mises.org and so on...