The $39 trillion national debt just got its own version of the viral Doomsday essay

America has its viral AI doomsday essay. Now it has a debt version.

No Labels, the centrist political organization that has spent 16 years pushing bipartisan solutions in Washington, has quietly released Nightmare on Main Street—a fictional “oral history” narrated from the vantage point of 2029, in which a cascade of weak Treasury bond auctions triggers an economic collapse worse than the Great Depression. It’s a deliberately unsettling document, written in the same near-future dystopian frame as the Citrini Research AI essay that briefly tanked software stocks earlier this year. Its authors believe the timing is not a coincidence, although they pointed out to Fortune their piece actually predated Citrini’s, and they haven’t wiped tens of billions of dollars off software stocks.

“There’s a sense that there are all of these threats gathering on the horizon,” Ryan Clancy, No Labels’ chief strategist, told Fortune. “And probably a recognition that our political system does not seem remotely equipped to deal with any of them.”

The report lands as the U.S. gross national debt recently crossed $39 trillion for the first time—a milestone reached less than five months after it hit $38 tril...