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Fortune
Fortune
Nick Lichtenberg

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

trump (Credit: Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

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.

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