Helicopter money is now the top agenda among central bankers as global markets have changed their mind over the time. The next big monetary and fiscal policy move is likely to be an airdrop of "money from helicopters".
Central banks of big economies are under pressure to keep their economies growing, and control inflation at a relatively low and stable level. And they see their ultimate option is money from airdrop. And, just last week, Bill Gross, a well-known investor and analyst, suggested in an analytical note that, within the next year or so, major central banks, including the Federal Reserve, could be forced to go this route.
As EUR/USD has reached a high of 1.1345, moving up on the weakness of the greenback, the ECB president is under pressure to weaken the common currency. Perhaps he'll use the "helicopter" option: talking about handing out money to euro-zone citizens in order for them to spend and push up inflation. So, helicopter money is flying to the rescue in Eurozone.
"Helicopter money" is an idea made popular by the American economist Milton Friedman in 1969, when he suggested that dropping money out of helicopters for citizens to pick up was a sure way to restart the economy and effectively fight deflation.
The concept is simple - just print money and give it to people to spend in the hope that the injection of funds will kick-start the economy. HSBC says central banks are stuck in a rut because all their traditional ways of stimulating their economies just do not work.
In April, Ben Bernanke, the former Fed chairman, who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, posted an article in which he said that, "under certain extreme circumstances," such as the onset of a recession, when politicians had ruled out a fiscal stimulus, helicopter drops "may be the best available alternative."
Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda also like to keep markets guessing by saying one thing and doing another, but, when it comes to ruling out "helicopter money" to reanimate the economy, officials and close associates say he almost certainly means it.  The BOJ is already helping finance Japan's huge public debt cheaply by gobbling up government bonds at an annual pace of 80 trillion yen ($737 billion), more than double the amount newly issued each year, but it is buying them in markets.
The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, and the Bank of England have effectively bought bonds from their governments for six years and allowed them to spend money to support their sagging economies. They buy the bonds by printing money or figuratively dropping it from helicopters, expanding their balance sheets in the process.
They then remit any net interest from their trillions of dollars or yen bond purchases right back to their Treasuries. The money in essence is free of expense and free of repayment as long as the process continues uninterrupted.
Most market analysts believe that central banks will print more helicopter money via QE "perhaps even in the US in a year or so and reluctantly accept their increasingly dependent role in fiscal policy. Such a move would allow governments to focus on infrastructure, health care, and introduce a "universal basic income" for displaced workers amongst other increasing needs.
"Helicopter money is here for anyone to spend how they like but no one dares admit the truth", says HSBC Bank. It is often considered one of the fiscal tools of last resort for a central bank because everything else in their armoury has failed.
HSBC points out that the ECB has tried to give money to banks in the hope they would lend the cash on at low rates, but so many have bad loans, they kept the cash to bolster their own balance sheets.
But central bankers like Raghuram Rajan of Reserve Bank of India is more critical of the notion that central banks, in seeking another way to boost their economies, could simply create large sums of money and distribute them to the public.
In a public lecture at the London School of Economics, Rajan suggested that quantitative easing-the policy of creating money to purchase financial assets and suppress interest rates, which the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the Bank of Japan have all adopted in recent years-had outlived its usefulness.
Rajan is a rising star in central banking and he is perhaps best known for his prescient warning about the global financial system in the run-up to the great collapse of 2008-2009.