Is the United States still a safe bet? For decades, it has been. US Treasury securities represent the world’s largest bond market, underpinning retirement plans, corporate balance sheets, and investment accounts everywhere. In times of turbulence, investors flock to Treasuries because they’re viewed as a surefire way to protect your money.

But Standard & Poor’s downgraded the US credit rating by one notch the last time there was a serious debt-ceiling showdown, in 2011, when the government came within hours of defaulting on some of its obligations. Now that we’re in another debt-ceiling standoff, some analysts think further downgrades are on the way.

“Congress is playing chicken with the debt ceiling,” bank analyst R. Christopher Whalen of Whalen Global Advisors wrote in a May 10 analysis. “We think the amount of US debt already demands a credit downgrade. Just the increase in debt service costs is enough reason for ratings action.”

When S&P downgraded the US credit rating in 2011, for the first time ever, it cited both fiscal and political problems. President Obama signed a bill raising the federal borrowing limit on August 2 of that year, just hours before the Treasury would have run out of money, forcing it to default of some payments. S&P found the bill Obama signed unsatisfying. Three days later, it lowered its US credit rating from AAA to AA+, with a negative outlook, meaning further downgrades could occur.

S&P said “the plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics ... The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed."

Twelve years later, the US fiscal position is objectively worse. The national debt has exploded from about $15 trillion in 2011 to more than $31 trillion today. As a percentage of GDP, total federal debt has ballooned from 65% in 2011 to 95%. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts that will rise to 132% 10 years from now. That’s around the same time Medicare and Social Security will start to run short of money.