Serious debt crises are always eventually handled by printing money. Or, more precisely, the crises keep on going till the authorities decide to print money. It

Serious debt crises are always eventually handled by printing money. Or, more precisely, the crises keep on going till the authorities decide to print money. It is only a question of "when". This can happen in a variety of ways, for example in the Great Depression it was handled by devaluing the dollar against the gold (Executive Order 6102 and the follow ups), in 2008 it was handled by QE. There is such a thing as excessive money printing, though. See Ray Dalio's book "Principles for navigating big debt crises" which analyzes 48 debt crises across the world, a few of them in great detail and establishes a general framework of the way those play out.