Is a recession coming? Alan Greenspan says the answer is in men’s underwear

Sounds weird, right? But it’s just one of the many strange ways experts try to predict booms and busts.

“He once told me that … the garment that is most private is male underpants, because nobody sees it except people in the locker room, and who cares?” longtime NPR correspondent Robert Krulwich said of Greenspan years ago. Those sales are usually stable, “so on those few occasions where it dips, that means that men are so pinched that they are deciding not to replace underpants.”

Skyscrapers soar

Andrew Lawrence, a director and former real estate analyst with Barclays Capital, created the “Skyscraper Index” in 1999. His theory was that an increase in very tall buildings happens as we’re approaching a bust — and when a building that breaks the record for world’s tallest is completed, a recession or economic crisis is imminent.

“We took the index as far back as the late 1800s and found that even going back that distance we could still find correlations between economic crises and completion of the world’s tallest building,” he said in an interview.

The Empire State Building was finished in 1930, just in time for the Great Depression, while the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) and the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers opened in the early 1970s as the US sunk into stagflation. In October 2009, construction company Emaar completed the exterior of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, and two months later, the Dubai government nearly defaulted.

Lawrence links these lofty ambitions to cheap credit, over-investment, and rampant speculation — typically signs of an economic top.

Today, most projects to build the highest tower are on hold. But in another way, billionaires are still spending their money to soar to the sky: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson are all competing in the space race.

Lipstick pick-me-ups