The economy's biggest risks

• The entrepreneur: Phil Town
  
• The company: Investor and Author of Rule #1 and Payback Time

"We owe $16 trillion. Let me put that in perspective. We've indebted ourselves the value of all of the public companies in the entire U.S. stock market. If we sold China every company in the United States that's publicly traded, we could pay off our debt.

"Of course, then they'd own Coke, GM, Ford, GE, Walmart, U.S. Steel, the Chicago Commodities Exchange, all of our shopping centers, our hospital administration companies, most of our insurance companies, United, Delta and American Airlines and we'd be working for the Chinese.

"Of course, about 1/4 of that debt is to China anyway, so to some large degree we already are. That's terrifying to me. We've mortgaged the entire future of our country."

NEXT: Weak spending - and high rates to come