Ihope visibility had improved for yesterday's scheduled opening of the Burj Dubai, the world's tallest building. Last week, when I passed through the emirate, you could barely make out the shard-like 800-metre tall tower - as high as Hong Kong's new International Commerce Centre with the Bank of China building sitting on top - through the thick haze of dust hanging over the Gulf city.
But a glimpse of the new skyscraper's shadowy outline piercing the sky above Dubai just one month after the near default of the city's leading investment company sent shockwaves through world markets called to mind the work of Christofer Rathke on the economics of tall buildings.
Back in 1994, Rathke, then working as a financial analyst in Tokyo, was inspired by thestart of building work on Malaysia's Petronas Twin Towers to investigate the correlation between skyscraper construction and equity market performance.
The results astonished him. 'Competing projects to build the world's tallest building are a sure-fire sign of imminent financial collapse,' says Rathke, who now runs a renewable energy fund in Singapore. 'As a rule of thumb, a bout of tallest building mania is followed by a 70 per cent stock market crash.'
There are plenty of historical examples. The skyscraper frenzy of the early 1900s, which saw the construction of New York's Singer Building and Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, was closely followed by the 'Bankers' Panic' of 1907 in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged more than 50 per cent.
The roaring 1920s saw another rash of skyscraper construction in New York with work starting on the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. Before they were finished, the party came to an abrupt end with the 1929 Wall Street Crash.
