Stocks are up because there is so much money around these days, and not a lot of places to put them. Bonds aren't paying, so don't put them there. Where else do you put your money?
There's plenty of other places to put money though.
I’d prefer that all stocks did a buyback instead of paying a dividend.
If you're curious, here's the full stock performance dataset I pulled for the last recession: https://shan.io/writing/learnings-from-the-2008-great-recess...