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Who do you think? all of this great research comes from the folks at cnn money.com and joining us now live from our new york studios is steve hargraves. who pays the difference? >> well, we would. the government has no emergency fund for this set up beyond the industry's 12.6 billion. so the taxpayers would have to pay it and the government would have to go out and raise that money. >> let's talk about the $720 billion number. how accurate would you say that is? i understand there's a little bit of controversy behind it. >> right, well, obviously it's an old study, it's from 1982. the governme...

Japan. $720 billion, that is the number that we're hearing of how much has been wiped off the value of the japan stock market. that's an incredible number. and this is why. there's been another big, big selloff today. if you look at the nikkei 225, down by 10.5% at the close, it was down by 14.4% at one stage today. this was panic selling. the market players in japan were saying that everything was being sold today, particularly by the big hedge funds. they were just dumping stocks. you had this panic selling. and over the past two days, we've seen after 6.2% fall and now this 10.5% fall. if...

>> that's right. between the two days, something like -- well, if you look at the entire tokyo stock index, something like $720 billion in value has been wiped off the value of japanese companies. it sort of puts it in context just how big this selloff has been over the past few days. as you say, 6.2% yesterday, and another even bigger fall today. 10.5% down. this is the nikkei 225, which looks at 225 of the biggest companies in japan. at one stage today, the nikkei was down 14.4%. even as it stands, it's still the third biggest fall in all time in japan. and what's specifically interesting ab...