The S&P 500 may have hit a record high Wednesday, but ace short-seller David Tice, president of Tice Capital, doesn't think the good times will last.

He predicts stocks will plunge 30 to 60 percent, as market participants lose confidence in the Federal Reserve and other central banks. He also forecasts gold will soar "far above $3,000 an ounce in the not-too-distant future," CNBC reports.

December gold futures traded at $1,286.80 on the Comex Friday morning.

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The Fed's massive easing program will fail, Tice maintains. The collapse of its "confidence game" will end with inflation rising and the Fed rushing to raise interest rates, he says. Financial markets will then suffer "a period of extreme turmoil, . . . [as] the Fed starts to lose control."

All this will be good for gold, Tice maintains. "Gold represents an unusually attractive opportunity. You have central banks around the world debasing their currencies. I've never been more confident of anything in my life," he tells CNBC.

Meanwhile, Burton Malkiel, author of the famous investing tome "A Random Walk Down Wall Street," says high valuations indicate stocks will underperform historical averages in the long term.

The cyclically adjusted price-earnings (CAPE) ratio, which includes 10 years of earnings, stands at 26.3. That trails only the market peaks of 1929, 2000 and 2007.

The CAPE ratio does reasonably well in predicting 10-year stock-market returns, Malkiel writes in The Wall Street Journal. "Long-run equity returns from today's price levels are likely to be considerably lower than their 10 percent long-run average."

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