The idea of giving money directly to people to boost growth was put forward in a famous 1969 article by Milton Friedman, who used the parable of scattering dollar bills from a helicopter for the public to pick up. 'Helicopter money'--printing money to distribute to the public--has been proposed by American bond investor Bill Gross and by the economics journalist Martin Wolf, among others.

What remains to be tried is helicopter money, a half-serious Milton Friedman recipe for stimulating a sluggish economy with sure-fire monetary means: throw money from helicopters, so people can pick it up and go shopping, and all will be fine.

the last bullet of monetary policy, and perhaps of policy generally, would be dishing out ‘helicopter money’ to citizens, perhaps by sending each taxpayer a cheque of, say, $3,000, circumventing the banking system in the hope that this would, finally, result in a take-off of effective demand