I’d like to see a refutation of the argument below, which counters bearish perspectives.
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"This synopsis might explain why years of predicted financial doom (as opposed to normal periodic ~20% downs in markets) have not materialized since 2008, and may not materialize for a long time, if ever."
The fiat debt-based monetary system still requires exponential growth. To keep that ballooning debt manageable in relation to the real world which cannot grow that quickly, they need to inflate it away. They then lie about inflation in order to justify low interest rates and try to convince you it is 2% when it is closer to 10%. But they need stable gold prices to hide true inflation because historically gold is seen as the canary in the coal mine of inflation. That is where the artificial gold price suppression scheme comes into play.
In addition to this, the US dollar's dominance over debt and oil depends on running a military-enforced global trade deficit.
The eastern world is not happy about those two things and they know exactly what is going on. That is why they have been quietly buying physical gold at cheap prices for a decade at least. This differential between manipulated prices and the physical market has caused a continuous gold supply deficit. We have all been hearing about this for years but and it hasn't blown up yet. But the gold imports data does support this conclusion.
When the world runs out of physical gold it will be impossible to continue the price suppression and it will blow up to much higher levels. Since gold is the antithesis to the debt based dollar, it will be impossible to hide the dollar's true value anymore and hyperinflation or other similar event will destroy the current monetary system. When easy debt dies as interest rates go up, so will marginal oil extraction like the tight oil in the US. Then oil price will spike even higher than it would from the dollar devaluation alone, and the whole delicate computer-balanced economic system will implode, taking society along with it.