An increase in the quantity of money or fiduciary media is an indispensable condition of the emergence of a boom. The recurrence of boom periods, followed by periods of depression, is the unavoidable outcome of repeated attempts to lower the gross market rate of interest by means of credit expansion. There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
Ludwig von Mises; Human Action: A treatise on Economics, Regnery, 1966, pg. 572.
ciport, All the things we discuss here, probably irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If you look at the collapse of the USSR, it was reasonably orderly, as was the post depression era in the USA. Will we go the full Mad Max civil disorder? I personally assign it a low probability.