Was the flash crash a market related fluke, or could it be telling us something about our future? When most investor’s think back to the most recent bear market, many remember Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the gut grinding months of September, October, and November. The event was so traumatic that it is easy to forget how it all got started.

The United States is very fortunate to have a front row seat to Europe’s, and soon Japan’s, sovereign debt crises. Going through the second phase of the credit crisis will be difficult short-term, but learning hard lessons from our neighbors will soon turn our ship out of harm’s way and ensure the long-term economic viability of the United States. It's not that we're smarter than our comrades across the pond, it's just that our economic cycle is five to ten years behind theirs.

Few would argue that we are currently involved in the biggest economic experiment in history. On the hot-seat are the economic policies of economist John Maynard Keynes, first put forward in the early twentieth century and which gained widespread political support post World War II. In a nutshell,and at the risk of oversimplifying, Keynes proposed that decisions made by the private sector sometimes lead to macroeconomic inefficiencies, thereby requiring government intervention to stabilize capital markets. He postulated that during times of economic slowdown, it was the government’s responsibility to spend public money to create jobs and to stimulate public demand for goods and services to re-energize the economy—ideas that were taken to heart by the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

In this letter, I have produced my top 10 list of risks I see in the immediate future. Several months ago, Greece would have been lower on my list. However, economic conditions are very fluid and seem to be changing at increasing speeds. I will also discuss my decision on when I plan to buy my next house. For those not familiar with my housing saga, I sold my house in May, 2006 because I fortunately saw this housing crisis approaching. I have been renting a home since then, and now my rental contract is due for renewal in March, so I need to decide whether to buy a house or continue to rent. I’ll outline my research on this decision.

Left to their own devices, free economies, with minimal governmental intervention, typically solve most problems they face. This is not to say that we should let people go hungry in the streets or minimize the effects of systematic risk, but when it comes to successful economies and governmental intervention, less definitely means more. Governments—even those governments with the best of intentions, have a bad habit of getting in the way of the natural economic process. They either make problems worse or they extend the amount of time it takes for a damaged economy to heal its wounds, or both. I can’t think of a situation where this is not the case.