Two interesting webinars on public debt by @ojblanchard1 & @B_Eichengreen . At the Paris school of Economics @ojblanchard1 presented a compressed and updated his AEA 2019 paper. He also announced an imminent new book with all the nuts & bolts of the deficits and debt issues. 1/
He thinks that r<g will dominate for 10 years or more. Market-based expectations so far agree with him. He defends regular stochastic DSAs instead of any quantitative rule for fiscal policy, conceding that if there must be one he favours a rule for the primary balance (s) /2n 
In a regime of low r,he portrays this choice: continue with fairly high deficits and increase r & r*; or reduce deficits and keep very low r & r*. It is, I think, a pertinent choice with low r and in an obvious non-Ricardian world. He favours the first option for several years 3/
In the long-term some combination of the 2 extremes is warranted, but it is important now to thrive to overcome secular stagnation or, as he said, to restore the effectiveness of monetary policy with higher r & r*lifted from negative levels in real and/or nominal terms 4/
@B_Eichengreen presented at PIIE his new book (w/ co-authors)“In defense of public debt”. It’s a book of economic history on debt since the year 1000, showing that in many (most) cases there were good justifications for debt. It develops their IMF wp imf.org/-/media/Files/… 5/
The book shows (depending on data) which drivers were behind the episodes of significant debt ratio reductions. The Table below shows the case of several countries in the 1920s. It provides a mixed picture on the relative weight of primary surplus or a r<g phase /6
After WW II, we can see in the Table below that the debt ratio reduction in advanced economies until 1970 benefited mostly from the r< g driver as growth was buoyant after the war and interest rates were kept lower. In nominal terms, r<g was also helped by a bit of inflation 7/
The book is not a theoretical piece on the analytics of debt and, wisely, spurns drawing quantifiable lessons about debt management for the future. However, it ends oddly with an ambiguous cautionary message but without being precise about the timing. 8/
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