> By contrast, I am currently living in Germany, and I have friends who are freelancers and they had support funds in their bank accounts less than a week after

> By contrast, I am currently living in Germany, and I have friends who are freelancers and they had support funds in their bank accounts less than a week after the lockdown started. Also there was already legal machinery in place to avoid job losses which was put in place in 2008 and activated almost immediately. Every tax payer got paid $1200. You're right that it took weeks to come and was inefficient, but paired with an eviction moratorium I think mitigated the impact of the delay. The PPP had issues, but I think the money did keep unemployment lower. That said, I'm not disputing that the German model for fiscal stimulus is better: it is. But I don't think there was a huge failure of fiscal stimulus in the US. > Why are these options mutually exclusive? You could provide direct support to tenants and also prevent evictions Agreed, I don't think those are mutually exclusive and I don't think more fiscal support to tenants would be a bad thing at all. I thought you were suggesting doing such instead of moratoriums, which seems unjust to me. > My concern is that if we optimize the recovery effort for increasing equity prices, but fail to address other risks, like lack of employment and the creation of housing debt, we could be setting ourselves up for failure in the medium term I don't think we are optimizing recovery efforts for increasing equity prices. I think that in the short-term higher equity prices is a consequence of expansionary monetary policy with a goal of reducing unemployment. I don't think we're seeing a housing debt crisis right now and the actions the Fed is currently taking are meant to reduce unemployment (which is higher than it should be right now).