"The world will just continue to money-print their way out of this now well-defined mess. It will bring some inflation but I don't see hyper-inflation with the massive capacity underutilization..."

It's highly unlikely we'll see hyper-inflation even with all the money printing. The couple of trillion US$ the US government printed was not even enough to replace the many trillions of money equivalent papers - the asset backed securities and their cousins printed by the various banks. These papers were once being traded as if they were money but were now all taken out of circulation - the total money supply has not increase because of the money printing. We are not seeing any inflation pressure in the US, in fact the Fed just indicated that interest rate would stay unusually low till 2014; a sign that they were not seeing any inflation pressure for a while.

The EU situation is similar; the several hundred billion Euro sovereign debt, if the Euro countries want to, can easily be replaced by Euro's or Euro Zone backed bonds and the problem would go away. All it takes is the political will from the countries and for Germany and France to carry a little more weight on their shoulders. Again, replacing the trillion or so of bad sovereign debt with good ones in total does not increase the money supply and should not lead to hyper-inflation.

There is plenty of idle manufacturing capacity and idle human resources around the world that would keep product pricing competitive for the foreseeable future; just look at the auto prices as an example, we are getting better cars for the same or less dollar compared to a couple years ago. JMO