Because life is so rough for them.  Via EconompicData.

The pervasiveness of the belief in rationality has brought our system to the brink of collapse.

From The Wall Street Journal

"It was brutal when you made calls," to clients, says Lloyd Glazer, managing partner at Mayflower Advisors. Mr. Glazer got his start in 1968 in the Boston office of a New York based brokerage Walston & Co. and by the mid-1970s was a stockbroker for Bache & Co. before moving to Bear Stearns Cos. "If somebody would even take your call you'd be delighted."

From The Wall Street Journal

At 3 p.m., do you get queasy just thinking about the toll that the final hour of trading might take on your portfolio?

New research suggests that on days when the indexes make big moves, leveraged exchange-traded funds could trigger a trading cascade, turning the market close into a buying or selling frenzy. ...

Fascinating read on the Great Depression by John Steinbeck. 

The situation today is nowhere near the environment of the 1930s.  It is not even close.

From Nasim Taleb's Black Swan, p221.

From a Wall Street Journal article on artists re-gentrifying blighted neighborhoods.

Is China buying copper as a way to diversify out of dollars?

China's State Reserves Bureau (SRB) has instead been buying copper and other industrial metals over recent months on a scale that appears to go beyond the usual rebuilding of stocks for commercial reasons.

From Salon

Here's how it works: A lender buys the bonds of a company -- let's say General Growth, the huge mall operator that declared bankruptcy this week. But then, hoping to hedge against the risk that General Growth might default on its bond obligations, the lender purchases a credit default swap protecting against that event from another party, in effect buying insurance against the chance that those bonds will go bust.

Anecdotal evidence of a bottom or top in financial markets is only obvious retrospectively.  When markets are falling or rising, there are always noteworthy items or events that could be viewed as anecdotal evidence of a bottom or top, only for the market to fall or rise even further, with more pieces of anecdotal evidence occurring as the bust/bubble continues.