Awesome! very well spoken... should make for a good convo!
First, I will give my views and standpoints.
I feel the US dollar's TRUE value is somewhere around 9-10 dollars. After being spent and respent so many times of course. The lack in the dollar is mainly (opinion here) due to our neighbors to the south, coming here, working their asses off and shipping out their earnings back to Mexico. The problem here, should be obvious.
Gold and Petrol prices are on the rise, or are they? I don't believe so.. I believe the dollar is just depreciating rapidly and it APPEARS that they are skyrocketing.. standard cost of living in America is outrageous, whereas in a Gold mining town (where I live currently) we're doing extremely well due to our major sources of income here coming from Gold, which is priced well over 800/t-oz. Compensation doesn't seem to exist currently (one of the imbalances you mentioned) which leads me to believe that the "check" for this "balance" will be a sudden and well needed DROP in the economy. We're looking at the US dropping out of the runnings for economical (insert word here... something similar to... domination with a little less totality).
I feel that the ridiculous market we see today (housing/vehicles) will plummet, and we will see the true VALUE of things, instead of popularity and conveniency prices we see today. Status items will hopefully fail to exist shortly after this proposed recession, at least temporarily. I can't see into the future, but I'm sure if I could, I wouldn't wanna make it to it!