in their book on financial crisis, carmen reinhart and kenneth tell us that public debt exceeding 90% of gdp is often a tipping point into a wrenching crisis, a point we are on pace to reach too soon. we only have to look at greece to see where the path we are on leads. we're here because we are committed to changing that course. getting america out of debt isn't the work of one president or one congress or one bill or perhaps in this case one decade. but i believe our work in congress must be about breaking a long pattern of fiscal irresponsibility and easy decisions. and putting america back on a more sustainable course. we've just passed, as all of us know, a health reform bill which some believe -- not without cause -- to be antithetical to the goal that i have just expressed. however, the nonpartisan congressional budget office tells us that the reform bill reduces the deficit over the first decade. it is projected to save us $143 billion and some $1 trillion in the decade after that. those savings, however, as david walker correctly points out in part are contingent on congres

show who is a pretty smart economist said "in my work on the history of financial crises with carmen reinhart we find that debt fueled real estate price explosions are a frequent precursor to financial crisis. what do you expect the ramifications to be when this chinese bubble bursts? what happens if nothing is done? >> well, it will run its own course no matter what because you, of course, now have people trying to develop any piece of property they can get their hands on to sell it to real estate speculators. so supply will equal demand at some point. it always does. then there's this precarious tipping point where suddenly you can't sell a project and then it's just as if everyone from the port side of the cruise ship goes to the star board side of the cruise ship all at once. you get a tipping point, you get this sort of lightbulb moment "i've got to get owl while i can" and the buyers dry up. it's as old as markets itself. >> rose: but this is not dubai world. this is the people's republic of china. what are the global implications? >> well, that's an interesting question. we're all look