How could Black Thursday have happened? Why wasn't the panic of March 1929 enough of a warning to Americans that the stock market was unstable?

When people buy lottery tickets for a $1 million prize, they feel as though they practically have that $1 million in the bank. They do have a chance of winning, after all, and even if it’s a small chance, it’s still more of a chance of winning than if they hadn’t bought a ticket at all. All the same, to increase their chances of winning, they might buy another lottery ticket--or 10 more. When they do this, their chance of winning does go up, slightly, but they have probably spent more on lottery tickets than they will ever win back. Still, it’s hard for them to resist the temptation to buy a few more…

In the 1920s, stocks were the ultimate lottery ticket. People spent money they didn’t have in hopes of winning a cash fortune, and in the meantime they ignored the fact that their chances of turning the paper value of their stocks into a real number of dollars were very slim. People knew they needed to sell their stocks at a very high price to make real cash--to get real dollars in their pockets. But they were so sure this would happen that they considered those dollars already theirs. They believed that one day they would make that big sale and have a real fortune as large as their paper fortune. So when anything happened to threaten their chances of selling stock and cashing in for real, people panicked. The panic of March 1929 was stopped by Charles Mitchell's loan, but it was still a warning sign of trouble ahead because that panic was caused by the same long-term factors that later caused the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Answer these questions to identify reasons why Americans were still playing the stock market right up to the Crash.