Where Time Stops Rhyming

Equities are replaying 1998. Rates and the Dollar are not (yet)

Analogues are a roadmap, not a prophecy. History doesn’t repeat. It mumbles, and if you’ve been at this long enough, you start to recognise the tune.

I’ve been chewing on this one for a while. The 1998 LTCM blow-up, the panicky Fed cuts, the V-shaped recovery, then the part everyone forgets: the Fed slamming it into reverse and the Nasdaq losing 80%.

April 2025 has been rhyming with it in a way that’s hard to ignore. Same gut-punch shock, same policy backstop, same melt-up off the lows. The S&P is up 29% from the trough. In 1998, at the same point, it was up 29%. Spooky.

But the equity match is the easy part. The interesting bit is where the two stop rhyming: rates, the dollar, and what the Fed is actually doing. Those are screaming something different, and I think that’s where the real signal lives.

So I lined up six series from each crisis through and laid 1998 to 2001 over the 2025 path to today. Below, I walk through where we are in the sequence, what the divergences are telling us, and the blueprint for what comes next if the analogue holds.

A caveat before you read on: this is a map, not a guarantee. The whole point of an analog is to give you signposts to watch, not a script to trade blindly. Some of these signposts are flashing. Some aren’t. That gap is the entire trade.

Paid subscribers, the full breakdown and charts are below.