Bob Woodward knows a thing or two about Washington D.C. He’s been writing about politics and power since the ’70s when he and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story. His latest book — his 17th — takes the reader inside the Obama White House during last summer’s debt ceiling crisis.  Yes, the one that almost swept the country and the markets into an economic meltdown. The book is called “The Price of Politics.”

Woodward spent hours interviewing President Obama for the new book. One of things Woodward learned from those interviews is that “Obama is a reformer at heart. At lots of moments, he tells people he’s a fiscal conservative… he told me — and this is a quote — “I would willingly lose an election if I could solve this problem of the federal debt and deficit in the right way, in a way that would be long-lasting.”

Woodward also says that we are headed for one of the greatest economic crisis in the history of the United States and if politicians in D.C. can’t come up with a solution, it could devastate the entire global economy. “It’s pessimistic, but it’s also fixable.”