Are we wealthier when the stock market goes up and poorer when it goes down

Economics Economics Questions
1

However, later critics of Keynesianism have argued that it was not fiscal expansion that ended the Depression, but that the Depression lasted much longer than it should have…" They certainly have argued that, but they are completely wrong, as the data show. The Dow Industrial Average reached 157 in February 1926 after exhibiting a steady rise from 64 in 1921. By July 1932 it had collapsed to 41. After Roosevelt announced the New Deal it steadily climbed again, reaching 197 in March 1937 - higher than it had been in 1926. After re-election in 1936, Roosevelt cut government spending and raised taxes. By April 1938 the Dow had dropped 45% from a year earlier and it didn’t get back above its 1937 peak until December 1945. So: stimulus started, Dow went up; stimulus stopped: Dow collapsed. Which part of this do Keynes’s critics not understand?

Can someone please explain or link an article?

2

The Dow Jones stock index isn’t the economy, or a good indicator of it’s health.

For example, view this: http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=DJIA&sid=0&o_symb=DJIA&freq=2&time=12

We can see that, right before it was declared that the US economy had entered a recession, the Dow Jones was at about it’s peak. The economy didn’t start doing bad in October because the Dow Jones dropped, because the economy was only doing bad, and people in the market were coming to that realization.