"Sure they collapsed in 1929, but counting dividends, the blue chips broke even by the late 1930s, and then took off."
It's easy to forget 90 years after the Crash that many investors were ridiculously over-leveraged in '29, sometimes using only 10% equity.
"Buying on margin became so popular that by the late 1920s, "ninety percent of the purchase price of the stock was being made with borrowed money." Not only that ... the U.S. economy had come to depend on that activity. Before the crash, nearly forty cents of every dollar loaned in America was used to buy stocks."
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