It's that time of year, when I throw caution to the wind and present my annual forecast issue. Jumping to the conclusion, I think a recession has begun, so the relevant question is to ask when the recovery will begin. We will look at the housing market, the continued implosion of the credit markets, and the deteriorating employment picture. Will the Fed worry more about employment and recession or about the very real inflation pressures? Oil? Gold? Which way the dollar? I am going to make some unusual calls, as well as highlight what I think will be the next looming problem in the growing credit crisis. We'll try to cover it all in just a few pages.

But first, one quick commercial note. I am looking to establish a relationship with a few venture capitalists, and/or broker-dealers who specialize in private equity placements. If such a relationship might interest you, please feel free to contact me. And now, let's jump into the letter.

As is usual for the forecast issue, we begin by looking at how I did last year. All in all, not bad. I correctly predicted the housing and subprime crisis, noted that there was a potential for the credit crisis to spread (which it did), and suggested that we would end the year in recession. As I will make the case later in the letter, I think we did just that in December. I got the direction of the dollar right, as well as energy, but I was wrong (as usual) about the stock markets. I thought a recession would lead to a lower stock market for 2007. It now looks like that lower stock market will show up in 2008.

How does the risk of default in California or Thailand get spread throughout the world, causing problem in money market funds in Europe and Florida? Yes, we can trace the linkages now, but was it possible to predict the crisis beforehand? And can we use what we learn to predict and hopefully hedge ourselves from the next crisis? Why do these things seem to be happening with more frequency? This week we are going to look at some economic theories which will give us some insight into the above questions. As it turns out, the more that individuals hedge their risk in economic markets - the larger the network - the more the entire system is put at risk. There is a lot of ground to cover, so we will jump right in.

Before we get to the economic theory, let's review part of a letter I wrote in April of 2006 discussing chaos theory, as it will give us a useful mind picture to understand the latter part of the letter. This was part of a letter where I laid out my thoughts that we would indeed experience a crisis in the future along the lines we are now seeing.

We are going to start our explorations with excerpts from a very important book by Mark Buchanan call "Ubiquity, Why Catastrophes Happen." I HIGHLY recommend it to those of you who like me are trying to understand the complexity of the markets. Not directly about investing, although he touches on it, it is about chaos theory, complexity theory and critical states. It is written in a manner any layman can understand. There are no equations, just easy to grasp well-written stories and analogies. www.amazon.com

This week we continue to look at an alphabet soup of problems: RMBSs, CDOs, Alt-A, BBB and - a new acronym to put on your radar screen - the very useful CDS. When does an AAA rating not mean an offering is ready for prime time? What type of contagion are we seeing from the Bear Stearns blow-up? I survey my friends in the hedge funds space, trying to find some evidence of cracks in the foundation, and let you know what I hear. We will again look at a wide variety of items and see if we can discern some connections.

I was writing last year that the subprime investment market would end in tears, as loans were being securitized as investment-grade that clearly were going to have problems. We are now witnessing the beginning of those travails, and the lawyers are gathering.

Let's review what I wrote in early January:

"We live in a world where there is an increased appetite for yield by investors at all levels; and armed with growing liquidity, they chase those yields down to a point where traditional risk-reward measures would suggest the potential for problems.