I'm afraid you're correct. I wish people would just pick up and read a history book. The Great Depression didn't start overnight. People have this misconception that things just got really sh*tty one day after the stock market crashed. Reality proved to be different. Things got a little better, then a little more worse. Rinsed and repeated until the Dow Jones lost 90% of its peak value. Couple this with a severe drought, the U.S. calling in its WWI loans from Europe, and a couple of other protectionist decisions, and you had yourself a depression.

Wishful thinking got us into this mess. And right now, we may as well view the stock market like a slot machine. It'll pay out a little, drag people in, and then take a lot of their money.

The other problem is that when lots of people start focussing on aggressively paying off their debt in bad times, it actually ends up temporarily hurting the economy. This is precisely what happened before the Great Depression. Why? Because they stop spending the money, and instead give money to big banks which do nothing but hoard it because the banks have lost paper money on the stock market. As the banks look to replenish their stock piles they largely refuse to loan the money out again. In a way, it's like chemo therapy in that the treatment for people's financial ailments might actually be the thing that kills them. But eventually the huge swaths of cash that the banks build up from debt repayments will come back into the market and there'll be a surge in investment activity, but that won't happen until the banks themselves are comfortable on their own feet, which is far from the case right now.