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This is a mostly good summary of interesting papers presented at the ASSA meetings -- but tellingly misrepresents what the paper by @ojblanchard1 actually said 1/ bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Here's how the authors put it: 2/ 
But if you read the actual paper, it doesn't say anything like "debt is bad but not catastrophic". It notes that in simple models a situation like the one we're in, in which interest rates are below growth rates, is one in which debt is actually good 3/ aeaweb.org/aea/2019confer…
Olivier then asks whether realistic complications reverse that result, and finds it unclear -- more debt may well actually be good, and in any case probably doesn't do much harm. It's really a radical repudiation of what the Serious People have been saying 4/
So it's misreporting to imply that it's just about downplaying the catastrophic risk aspect; the chairman of the AEA is basically saying that the whole deficit scold enterprise that dominated so much political discourse was bad economics 5/
