"To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown - the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none... The cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear ..." Friedrich Nietzsche

This weekend I turn 60 and have been a little more introspective than usual. I am often told that the letter I wrote well over three years ago on ubiquity and complexity theory and the future of the economy was the best letter I have ever done. I went back to read it, and it has aged well. I basically outlined how a financial crisis would unfold, and now it has.

On reflection, I think that there are perhaps other, even larger, events in our future than the recent credit crisis and recession; yet, just as in 2006, there is a great deal of complacency. But as we will see, there are fingers of instability building up that have the potential to create large disruptions, both positive and negative, in our future. And for the political junkies in the room, I offer a brief insight into what may be one of the more intriguing behind-the-scenes developments in recent years. Now, to the letter.

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

Once again it's time for me to demonstrate the foolhardy part of my nature by putting to electronic pen my forecast for 2006. I spend more research time on this one letter than on any four or five combined, simply reading hundreds of pages of research, looking at mountains of data all in an effort to try and catch the gist of the markets. It is a daunting task, but one to which I actually look forward, as it challenges the mind like few other endeavors.

If I go into as much detail as I usually do on each topic, there is the potential for this e-letter to be much too long. Therefore I will try and take the larger picture, make specific and shorter predictions and save the details and the arguments for later issues. Let's begin by quickly reviewing how we did last year.

We are awash in debt, assert numerous authorities. And they point to the charts which show debt mounting seemingly to the sky. But not all debt is bad. Some of it is good. We should save more and spend less. But if we do, there are consequences that we may not like. What's good for an individual may be a problem for a global economy. We continue with our series on trade balance and debt, with the thought going through our minds "Be careful what you wish for."

But before we get into that, let's look at something far more important.