It's studying for the test. It's too common to see a stock index as the stock market as the economy, buy they're all distinct things. Ideally an index _should_ represent that market, but when an economy becomes massively centrally planned by an overreaching fed, it's too easy to prop up those in the index to make the "economy" look strong. Ultimately, purchasing power, people's ability to save, liquidity of assets, etc were pretty bad before this recession. Those are the things we should actually care about - maximizing utility.

It's especially galling because the people pushing for these nigh-Stalinist levels of fed intervention and central planning (look how much support oddly favoured industries like manufacturing and coal get) are also posturing as champions of the Free Market. It's like we can't make any progress because nobody in charge is willing to argue in good faith.