Last week, the bond market sent Washington a message. The 10-year Treasury yield climbed to 5.04%, its highest level since 2007, and the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since 2023. Oil prices and inflation lit the match, but mounting government debt sits on every analyst's list of reasons yields keep climbing. And that number travels far beyond trading floors: the 10-year Treasury yield is the benchmark that guides mortgage rates, corporate borrowing costs, and credit conditions across the economy.

Here is what they are climbing against. The gross national debt crossed $40 trillion in August, after hitting $38 trillion in October and $39 trillion in March — roughly a trillion dollars every five months. The deficit reached $2 trillion with a month still left in the fiscal year — a gap the Treasury fills by issuing new securities that investors have to be willing to buy. In 2025, Moody's became the last of the three major credit rating agencies to strip the United States of its AAA rating, joining S&P (2011) and Fitch (2023).

In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway's Bill Gorton asks his drinking companion Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Campbell replies. “Gradually and then suddenly.” By that measure, America is deep into “gradually.”

Bigger stakes than the debt itself

Reserve currency status is why the world lends the United States money cheaply, why it can run deficits that would break any other country, and why American sanctions have teeth. That privilege rests on confidence that America pays its bills — and confidence, like Mike Campbell's fortune, can be lost gradually, then suddenly.

The compounding has already started. In fiscal year 2025, net interest payments hit $970 billion — about $150 billion more than the country spent on national defense — and rose another $111 billion, or 12%, this year. America now pays more to its creditors than to its military. Interest is the fastest-growing major program in the budget, projected to more than double to $2.1 trillion by 2036. The government, in effect, is rolling over an adjustable-rate loan the size of the economy — and last week, the rate adjusted.

A half-century of missed budgets

For its first 200 years, Congress lived relatively within its means; before Keynesian economics, the discipline was known as “old-time fiscal religion.” Then came the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, which created a process built on a budget resolution and 12 appropriations bills. In the half-century since, Congress has completed that process on time exactly four times. It will not be five this year: with not one of the 12 bills enacted, lawmakers punted to December 11 so members could campaign first. If that deadline arrives with the bills still missing, funding lapses and a government shutdown begins.

So why won't Congress fix it? The author watched the answer from the inside. As a Senate budget staffer, the author helped put an actual budget resolution on the floor in the summer of 2022 — then-Senator Mike Braun's attempt to make the Senate do the one thing the Budget Act requires of it. The motion to proceed failed 34–63 and did not garner a single news story. That was not a vote against that particular budget, the author writes, but a vote against debating any budget at all. The lesson learned: one cannot legislate political will.

The gimmicks are everywhere once you know where to look

First enacted in 1990 and made permanent in 2010, statutory PAYGO requires new spending to be offset with new revenues. In practice, the spending happens in the first few years; the taxes show up later — and then, conveniently, never show up at all. The Affordable Care Act's revenues are a case in point: Congress deferred a tax here and a tax there, then made most of them go away. The author draws a parallel to Enron's mark-to-market accounting — booking hypothetical profits today to pay out bonuses without a real dollar coming in the door. The difference is that people in the private sector went to jail.

The caps Congress, Congress waives. “Emergency” designations exempt spending from every fiscal rule, and the PAYGO scorecard — the mechanism meant to trigger automatic cuts for deficit-increasing laws — is waived with a few words on the last page of every omnibus. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has failed eight straight audits; in 2022, it could not fully account for 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets — not exactly a report to share with your banker.

And here is the part the public rarely hears: the fiscal fights featured on cable news cover only 27% of the budget — discretionary spending. Politicians get to ignore mandatory spending (60%) and interest on the debt (13%).

The referee's warnings

None of this is a secret to the referee. The Congressional Budget Office's long-term budget outlooks now sound like a broken record: rising debt risks a fiscal crisis in which investors lose confidence, rates rise abruptly, and the dollar's reserve status erodes. The doctor has put it in the chart; the bloodwork is slipping. The only question is whether anybody reads the file.

It has been said that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. That, the author argues, is America's real condition as the world's reserve currency — not healthy, just healthier than everybody else in the ward, even as foreign investors hold a shrinking share of U.S. debt. Maybe that is the bet: as long as the United States is better than the alternatives, the money has nowhere else to go, and the heart attack never comes.

But “better than everybody else” is a relative measure, and relative measures move. Britain was the world's reserve currency until it wasn't. The ratings agencies have spoken. The government's own scorekeeper has put its warning in writing. And Congress is asleep at the wheel. Heart attacks do not announce themselves — when one shows up, austerity looks like stents and valves, and that is presuming the patient gets to the emergency room in time.

Being king only works if that one eye stays open. Gradually is now. Suddenly is the part nobody schedules.

The opinions expressed in Fortune commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.