One framing I keep coming back to is this: historical analogies are useful when they sharpen questions, not when they pretend to predict the script. What is happening: The value of history is rarely in exact repetition. It is in seeing how incentives, leverage and policy constraints rhyme across cycles. That is how the past becomes a decision tool instead of a decoration. In practice: An analogy helps most when it tells you what variable to monitor now, not when it tells you to copy a past trade blindly. Watch for: The mistake is treating similarity of headlines as similarity of market structure. Useful lens: Before reacting, ask what mechanism would still matter here if the headline disappeared tomorrow. That is usually where the edge is: not in the vocabulary, but in the structure underneath it.