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BOB MOON: Good to have you with us on this March 2nd, a Friday that probably couldn’t come soon enough for some investors who watched the stock market keep right on falling today. And now investors seem to be worried this spiral could continue for awhile.

Why? That’s the question analysts have been asking all week. And today, David Walker, the country’s Comptroller General, posits one important cause. Investors are worried that we’re brimming with red ink.

It’s not just government spending, but personal debt that could make it hard to bail the country out if foreign investors stop propping us up. He says what happened this week might be the wake-up call the country needs.

strong class=”name”>DAVID WALKER: I don’t think that we should read too much into what happened in one given day or one given week of the market. But I do think that we have to recognize reality. And it’s time that we start making tough choices in order to mitigate the risk and to hopefully avoid a larger crisis from ocurring in the future.

MOON: So how are we doing so far? The Congressional Budget Office said today that President Bush’s spending plan for the next fiscal year narrowly fails to balance the nation’s books by 2012.