Most economic observers have a favorite quirky indicator, a data set more amusing than scientific. Hemlines, divorce rates, traffic jams, beer consumption, Super Bowl winners, hair lengths, Big Mac prices, Google searches, you name it. Skyscrapers are mine.

Since the late 1990s, I've been amused and intrigued by the striking correlation between world's-tallest-building projects and economic woes. It was the completion of Malaysia's Petronas Towers coinciding with the 1997 Asian crisis that first hooked me. That followed similar links in 1970s New York and Chicago, where the World Trade Center and Sears Tower were completed amid fiscal crises, stagflation and the breakdown of the Bretton Woods monetary system.

Before that, in 1929, 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler Building presaged the Great Depression. The 1931 opening of the Empire State Building came even as the funk deepened. The Panic of 1907 dovetailed with the christening of the 47-story Singer Building and 50-story Metropolitan Life Building (both in Manhattan). History is packed with such episodes, from the biblical Tower of Babel to Dubai's 818-meter Burj Khalifa Tower monstrosity in 2009 to the Shanghai Tower being completed, as fate would it, now. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that Chinese stocks are crashing and Hong Kong's dollar peg is under attack.