I love these doom and gloom economic indicators.
Because they are 100% valid
How much rebar can you reduce in a building before it collapses?
How many rivets can you remove from the airplane before it crashes?
How much government debt can American handle before it causes our destruction.
We know it will, eventually - the only question is - WHEN?
Your analogies are good ones.
The branch of mathematics that deals with these types of phenomenon is chaos theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
The wikipedia article is a good one on this topic.
It explains why we cannot predict the collapse of a broken system.