Yet, what I do know is the powers that be will do everything to keep it going. [...] It could come crashing down any second now, but at the same time, they could simply keep this system chugging along.
The problem is, for all their might the Powers That Be are still just the institutions of a particular society. They draw their justification for existence from its mythology, and so are bound by it. And that means they can't, in fact, spend endless amount of money they don't have since that violates the assumptions underlaying our concept of what money is. Nor can those assumptions be altered without sparking an outright revolution, since that would reveal the entire game of masters and servants as what it is: just an option amongst many, not an unalterable law of nature.
So, what happens is the various Powers do their best to keep the system chugging along, but as it evolves further away from a stable equilibrium their means fail catastrophically one by one. We're currently seeing the effects of one such failure, that of consumer credit. Of course banks could simply continue extending credit ad infinitum without expecting it to be paid back since it's all just numbers, except not really, because that would ultimately reveal money to be nothing but a bookkeeping fiction. So they stopped, cheap credit failed to mask the real situation anymore, and now economy is going through a shock.
There's going to be more such shocks as more instruments fail in turn. They'll get worse each time, since the already-failed ones are no longer there to help arrest the fall, until finally too much of superstructure is gone to keep the system standing and the crisis turns into death convulsions. In the meantime, expect all the usual trappings of the end of an era, such as various types of fundamentalists and their increasingly desperate struggle for power.