Titans of finance are joining No Labels in warning about our unsustainable national debt. The question is whether Washington is paying attention.

This week, Fortune ran a feature on the No Labels booklet Nightmare on Main Street, our oral history of an American debt crisis told from the vantage point of 2029. The piece compared it to the viral AI doomsday essay that briefly tanked software stocks earlier this year and zeroed in on a line that captures why we wrote it: Washington is not going to solve this debt problem until it is forced to.

We wrote Nightmare on Main Street as a wakeup call. On our current course, something like the scenario it describes is going to happen. The country is sleepwalking toward it.

Consider the reporting in the past two weeks alone:

• The gross national debt crossed $39 trillion, and Washington added the last trillion dollars in less than five months.

• Just this week the publicly held portion of the debt surpassed 100 percent of our nation’s GDP, the first time that has happened since 1946.

• Net interest payments are now expected to hit $1 trillion this fiscal year, which is more than the entire defense budget.

• The Congressional Budget Office now projects the federal deficit will balloon from $1.9 trillion in 2026 to $3.1 trillion by 2036.

The most respected voices in finance see what is coming. Jamie Dimon, the longtime CEO of JPMorgan Chase, told an investment conference in Oslo this week that on the current trajectory there will be some kind of bond crisis, and then policymakers will have to deal with it. Hank Paulson, who served as Treasury Secretary during the 2008 financial crisis, warned this month that confidence in U.S. Treasury securities is starting to break down and that demand could eventually collapse. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has called the trajectory unsustainable and said it will not end well.

These are the people who have firsthand experience with the plumbing of the global financial system, so when they sound the same alarm at the same time, it is worth listening.

The chart below shows six warning signs that typically precede a sovereign debt crisis. Not one of them currently reads as stable for the United States.

The reason No Labels keeps returning to this issue is that a debt crisis affects every aspect of our politics and public lives, not just our economy. The Great Depression sent millions of Americans into the arms of demagogues at both extremes. The Communist Party of the USA was filling Madison Square Garden in the 1930s, and fascist movements began to take over Europe. When ordinary life breaks down, people become more willing to back whoever promises to burn the system down. And in every case, the result is worse than what came before.

Right now, the debt is an issue most Americans do not think about, but that can change overnight. In early 2020, COVID went from a story most people skimmed past to the central fact of every life in a matter of weeks. A failed Treasury auction, a sudden spike in yields, a bank that cannot meet withdrawals: any of these could move the debt from page A14 to the only thing anyone is talking about.

Washington has shown no real appetite for getting ahead of this. The most recent budget proposal from the White House would push defense spending past $1.5 trillion while leaving the structural deficit untouched. Congress has yet to advance any serious plan to bring annual deficits below the 3 percent of GDP benchmark that economists across the political spectrum agree is sustainable. Both parties have signed off on the binge, and neither has taken responsibility for the bill.

This issue will not be solved until the American people force it to be solved. That is the work in front of us, and it is the work we are going to keep doing.

Join us on Thursday for the next call in our fiscal series, where we will dig into one of the largest pieces of the puzzle: healthcare. The decisions Washington makes about Medicare and Medicaid in the next few years will help determine whether the debt crisis we wrote about stays fictional.