What's happening is that the world's mass of financial paper, the majority of which (100's of trillions) was derivatives based on mortgage backed securities) is deflating -- bubble bursting time. The void is being partially filled by Treasuries, as we set up to go through a recession, and form the base for the next bubble.
we had a real deflation during the mid 90’s. A lot of companies went broke because they could not repay debts with dollars more valuable than those they had borrowed only a few years earlier. Money moved away from commodity based companies and 3rd world countries to high tech/service companies as their exposure to commodities was minimal. That’s why we had the dotcom bubble.