[Godel_unicode]

That's not how dividends work. Dividends are related to how much profit/cash the company has, and how many shares are outstanding. The price of an individual share doesn't effect that, only issuance of new shares and changes in cash flow.

[ericd]

Shares frequently crash in conjunction with economic pullbacks, which mean lower revenue/earnings for companies, which means less spending by those companies, which means lower revenue/earnings for other companies, and layoffs, which means lower earnings for workers, which means less spending, etc etc.

[Godel_unicode]

Shares of individual companies also frequently crash for reasons totally unrelated to economic pullbacks, and thus none of those things are guaranteed to happen simply because a share now costs less.

[ericd]

Sure, but I assume we're generally talking about index/portfolio investing here when we talk about stocks in general?