Helicopter money is distinct from QE
Stanislas Jourdan, 3-25-2017, Executive Director of the Brussels-based NGO Positive Money Europe and expert on universal basic income, Eurozone governance, and participatory democracy and former journalist who co-founded UBIE and MFRB, "Helicopter money and basic income: friends or foes?," BIEN — Basic Income Earth Network - Educating about Basic Income, https://basicincome.org/news/2017/03/helicopter-money-basic-income-friends-or-foes/
A second clarification is also required at this point: helicopter money is also different from the so called “quantitative easing” (QE) policies that have been implemented by several central banks, although they pursue a similar objective: boosting the money supply to avoid deflationary pressures.
Under QE, central banks create money (the so called central bank’s reserves) and mobilize those reserves to purchase financial assets on a large scale and over a certain period of time. Usually, central banks purchase sovereign bonds with the intention of pushing down interest rates on those bonds, to encourage the financial sector to move away from investing in sovereign bonds and to instead lend money to riskier projects under the so-called “portfolio rebalancing effect”. This type of money creation is therefore targeted to the financial sector, with assets as collateral on the central bank’s balance sheet and, more importantly, is a temporary operation: the central bank destroys the money once the bonds it holds come to maturation.
Helicopter money is therefore very different from QE. In fact, it is precisely because of the many shortcomings of QE that helicopter money is being presented by a growing number of people as a superior alternative.