With no agreement on spending anywhere on the horizon for the current fiscal year, the US Congress passed yesterday a 'Continuing Resolution' to keep the government temporarily funded for another six weeks.

This is nothing new; in fact, Congress has passed more than 50 Continuing Resolutions just since 2010, primarily because they almost NEVER manage to figure out the budget prior to the start of the fiscal year on October 1st.

But now there is far greater need to get it right than ever before.

I've been writing about this a lot lately, because, frankly, it is a critical issue. Failing to fix the spending problem spells disaster for the United States… and for the US dollar.

I wrote recently how the Congressional Budget Office projects the US government will add $20 trillion to the national debt through 2033.

$20 trillion is an absurd amount of new debt. And there are very few groups and institutions capable of loaning such a vast sum of money.

Social Security, for example, was one of the biggest buyers of US government bonds for several decades. And at this point they own roughly $3 trillion of the national debt.

But Social Security is now bleeding so much money that the program is no longer able to loan the Treasury Department any more money.

Foreigners also used to be highly reliable buyers of US Treasury bonds; even as recently as a few years ago, foreign ownership of US federal debt was more than 33%.

But foreigners are rapidly losing their appetite for US government bonds, and their ownership has plummeted to 22% very quickly.