I find this a pretty poorly written piece. It seems to have forgotten about the headline question after the first few paragraphs, and doesn't make any other cle

I find this a pretty poorly written piece. It seems to have forgotten about the headline question after the first few paragraphs, and doesn't make any other clear point in the end. Here's a very traditional economist answer. Helicopter money is neither a way of of the current crisis, nor a fallacy. It is good to do it now, but it won't "solve" the crisis. It's still much better to do it than not. Macro-economic recessions/crises, defined as a temporary drop in aggregate income/production (= GDP = GDI), are caused by a drop of (some combination of) aggregate demand (how much people will buy at a given price level) or aggregate supply (how much people produce at a given price level) [1], in economic parlance, negative supply- or demand shocks. If we have a pure supply shock, demand side measures such as lowering interest rates, helicopter money, government stimulus, will mostly just increase prices. OTOH, with a pure demand shock, most of such measures will probably help[2]. With demand shocks, the productive capacity is still there ("potential output"), but the demand needs to increase to "close the output gap". Most post-WW2 recessions in advanced economies are negative demand-shock recessions (we haven't been able to identify short-term economy-wide drops in production capacity), so demand side stimulus is by and large helpful (except when they really overdid it in the 1970, when it did cause high inflation). The current crisis is a combination of both a big demand shock and a big supply shock. This means that demand side measures such as helicopter money will help (in the sense that things will be much worse if we did't do it). But things will also become more expensive (either nominally in sticker prices if the demand stimulus is large enough, or just in real terms compared to people's incomes) due to the supply shock. The supply side shock can only be remedied by really controlling the pandemic. All of this is very moderate traditional undergraduate level economics, and will explain most of the upcoming economic upheavals perfectly fine. Keep this in mind when you read stories cherry picked to make some point about current/upcoming economic or monetary policy. [1] A drop in aggregate supply could be cause by e.g. a big natural disaster, war, pandemic. What might cause a drop in aggregate demand is still somewhat of a mystery. [2] Most of the economic debate is which form of stimulus is more effective, and about more esoteric second order effects. But there might still a minority of hard core "Real Business Cycle" economists who doubt the existence of demand-side shortfalls.