Precedents
Precedents.
Vetted historical shocks, measured. What a real war, recession, or selloff did to the variables that matter — normalized as peak deviation from a pre-event baseline so the pattern can be dropped onto a live scenario.
Right now
Today’s conditions rhyme most with The Post-COVID Inflation Surge — 100% match (3 of 3 emphasized signals moving its way).
Directional match over the last 90 days · a read, not a forecast
The library
The 2023 Regional Banking Crisis
The March 2023 regional bank failures. Silicon Valley Bank and Signature failed within days as uninsured deposits fled; First Republic followed in May. A duration-and-confidence shock: banks sat on underwater bond books as rates rose, and deposit flight did the rest, until the Fed/FDIC backstop arrested it.
Rate Shock (1994 / 2022)
A rapid monetary-tightening shock. 1994 (the "bond massacre") and 2022 (the fastest hiking cycle in forty years) both re-priced bonds, growth equities, and the yield curve in a matter of months. 2022 is the modern analogue: front-end rates from ~0% to ~5%, the deepest curve inversion since 1981.
The Post-COVID Inflation Surge
The 2021-23 inflation surge. US CPI rose from ~1.5% to a 9.1% peak in June 2022 on supply-chain snarls, fiscal stimulus, and an energy spike — ending four decades of disinflation and forcing the fastest hiking cycle since the 1980s. This is the inflation side of the 2022 shock; the policy response is the Rate Shock precedent.
COVID-2020 Shock
The fastest crash and fastest recovery on record. A global shutdown collapsed demand in weeks; unprecedented fiscal + monetary response drove a V-shaped rebound in markets within months, though sector effects were highly uneven.
Trade War & Tariff Shock
A tariff-driven trade conflict, anchored on the 2018-19 US-China escalation and generalized to the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tail. Each escalation spiked equity volatility, manufacturing PMIs rolled over, input costs rose, and capex paused on uncertainty — a clear growth and margin drag without (in 2018-19) a recession.
Election & Policy-Regime Shift
An election / policy-regime-shift archetype, generalized across major political turning points (deregulation, tax reform, trade and industrial-policy pivots). The market reaction is sector rotation plus a volatility spike into the event that resolves afterward — durable sector winners and losers rather than a broad index crash.
The Eurozone Sovereign-Debt Crisis
The euro-area sovereign-debt crisis. Greek, then peripheral (Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy) bond yields blew out as markets questioned euro-area solvency and redenomination risk, until Draghi's "whatever it takes" (July 2012) backstopped it. A sovereign-bank doom-loop and contagion episode.
2008 Global Financial Crisis
A credit shock that became a global recession. Subprime losses froze interbank funding, Lehman failed in September 2008, and a deleveraging cascade ran through credit, equities, housing, and the labor market over roughly twenty months.
The Dot-Com Bust
The collapse of the internet/telecom bubble. The Nasdaq fell ~78% from its March 2000 peak, roughly $5T in market value evaporated, a mild recession arrived in 2001, and tech endured a multi-year capex winter. A valuation-and-sentiment unwind, not a credit event.
The Asian Financial Crisis
The 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis. Thailand's baht devaluation cascaded across Asian currencies and equities, triggering capital flight and IMF bailouts, and ultimately the August 1998 Russian default and the LTCM collapse. A currency-peg-break, EM-contagion, and leverage-unwind episode.
Regional War
A geopolitical/war shock archetype, anchored on the 1990–91 Gulf War and generalized across regional conflicts: a supply-risk premium spikes oil, safe-haven flows bid gold and compress yields, defense equities outperform, and broad equities sell off on the initial risk-off before typically recovering.
Japan: Bubble & the Lost Decade
Japan's asset-bubble collapse and "lost decade(s)." The Nikkei fell ~80% from its 1989 peak, land prices collapsed, and the economy slid into a balance-sheet recession with entrenched deflation that monetary policy struggled to break for twenty-plus years. The canonical debt-deflation case.
Black Monday
October 19, 1987 — the Dow fell 22.6% in a single day, the largest one-day percentage drop in history, driven by portfolio-insurance and program-trading cascades rather than any fundamental cause. The market recovered most of the loss within two years.
1973 / 1979 Oil Shocks
Two supply-driven oil shocks — the 1973 OPEC embargo and the 1979 Iranian revolution — that roughly quadrupled then re-doubled crude, drove double-digit inflation, and produced stagflation: falling output alongside rising prices. The defining shock of the 1970s.