Right now there is a Libertarian/Capitalist/Right Wing consensus that the "lite," Keynesian interpretation of social democracy is failing and a New Libertarian Order is inevitable - either that or collapse and anarchy.
But the logic for this demands that the price of gold continue to rise along with money-printing. But now we see that's not going to happen. Why not? Because money - real money, accounting money, credit money - is a flexible, fungible, adjustable set of rules, conventions and behaviors rather than a thing - a commodity or commodity equivalent.
Money is the probability that promises will be kept and future payments made. Increased cash FLOW (not bars sitting idle in a vault) increases that probability. As the Developed World gets older, it produces less. Cash flow naturally moves towards productivity and increased consumption and away from old age and working population decline.
The problem is that as the Developed World ages, the ratio of its claims on cash flow (securities, pensions) to its productivity increases, even as that productivity decreases. Claims on cash flow still reside with the aging, less-productive developed world. The only answer is to decrease the value of those claims through currency depreciation, monetization and default.
While it's tempting to see all three of these as the same thing - default - it's entirely inaccurate. The view that currency depreciation and monetization are default-equivalents leads Libertarians to see this process as heading towards collapse. This is because the gold-based view of money is too inflexible and unsophisticated. Interestingly, Karl Marx's inflexible belief that money was ultimately gold-based led many Communists to their wrong-headed predictions.
The balance of approaches towards reducing the value of Developed World claims on global cash flow is very important. Monetization and currency depreciation allow markets to re-value claims without undermining the underlying promises to pay while massive default casts the shadow of doubt on good debts as well as bad, destroying money and hurting global cash flow.
What happens now is monetization. All the major Central Banks have started it (whether they admit it or not) and they will continue to monetize as they find that it is painless except for asset bubbles stimulated by the excess cash flow. As long as the cash flows into equities and commodities doesn't create new debt with them as collateral, the "default" of market busts is a natural form of asset devaluation.
This will not comfort the people who bought gold at $1700, but there are bigger concerns than their feelings.