FTA: “The model's trying to find what's called a fixed point where everything just adds up, everything's consistent, and it's not able to do that,” Smetters explained.”

So, nothing crashed. The message simply is that this model doesn’t handle this case, so our (or that of this team of researchers) understanding of economics is incomplete.

That happens elsewhere, too, for example in Newtonian physics where the precession of Mercury deviates from what that model predicts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Pe...).

In neither case, that is reason to say the people involved are charlatans.