Where we're headed:

I'm not quite as alarmist as this guy:

We face extreme danger. Unless there is immediate intervention on every front by all the major powers acting in concert, we risk a disintegration of global finance within days. Nobody will be spared, unless they own gold bars.
-Ambrose Evans-Prichard

...but he's probably smarter than me...

Here's a little powerpoint I made that tries to explain a few things. I might expand on it a bit later.

I was pretty shocked when I ran the linear regression from the peak of the 1987 boom and that simple math formula almost exactly predicted the bust that would follow it (it's about midway through the video). One would assume then that the crash we are witnessing today would only fall to about 9500 based on the linear regression, however that doesn't really take into account any other increases in prices that may occur as all this money leaves the stock market in an effort to find a safer place to live.

I guess the main thing I've come to realize lately is that the rise in stock prices over the past 20 or 30 years is primarily a result of the Federal Government inflating the currency. The reason we haven't necessarily seen such dramatic price increases as a result of the inflation in other parts of our lives is because the stock market was rapidly growing and able to create a demand for money that kept up with the inflation of it. But what we are getting ready to witness is a giant devaluation of the stock market. All that money will want to go somewhere, once that money leaves the "bubble" of the stock market and starts to enter into other parts of the economy we will begin to see prices rise, probably starting with gold.

If you want to read a good book on this subject read "Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?" by Richard Maybury, it will bring you up to speed pretty rapidly.