As China's stock markets have lurched wildly, seeding dramatic falls around the world, some have drawn parallels with the global financial crisis of 2008 or the Asian version a decade earlier. They are weak comparisons.
The abrupt end of Japan's boom in the 1990s — complete with stock crash and property bust — offers the most striking similarities, and the most valuable lessons.
China's stocks ran up gains of 150 percent in about a year before the mid-June crash, supercharged by margin lending and ignoring the drumbeat of disappointing economic data.