As recently as February, General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) had hopes of maintaining its dividend payout.  “We’ve got the cash flow to pay the dividend,” GE Chief Executive Officer Jeffery Immelt said in a Feb. 5 interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Is the bull back? Not so fast, according to market history.

It’s the zeitgeist, dear reader, and a wonderful way for governments who got us into this mess to deflect attention from their less than stellar performances as stewards of the economy.

If the pattern of the ’30s holds, we won’t see the stock market bottom until 2011.

The path to permanent wealth is paved with high-yielding dividend stocks and reinforced with gold. With a housing market that’s in tatters and an economy that’s reeling, most U.S. investors see the current market as perhaps the worst ever to even think about such topics as saving, investing and wealth.

I’m not sure if the stock market has reached its ultimate low for the Great Bear Market of 2007-9.  But even if additional declines lie ahead, there are probably a few stocks worth buying anyway.

Since sinking to a 12-year low of 676.53 on March 9, the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index had risen 24% — the best such short-term rally since 1933. But this isn’t 1933 and you shouldn’t trust the rally. Happy Days are NOT here again, at least not yet.

The U.S. government is going to have to print up trillions of dollars worth of new money in an attempt to break out of this economic crisis. This excess supply of currency in circulation is going to lead to demand-pull inflation.

“We’ve averted” the risk of a depression, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said this week. “Now the problem is to get the thing working properly again.”

Wall Street trader David Feldman lived through the Great Depression. In 1997, at the age of 87, he set down his thoughts in a little memoir entitled, “The Ups and Downs of a Wall Street Trader During the Depth of the Great Depression of the 1930s.”