Word.ws English Dictionary

helicopter money

helicopter money noun: money that is created and dispersed by the central bank.

Noun

helicopter money (uncountable)

  1. Money that is created and dispersed by the central bank.
    • Money is endogenous and not exogenous money (represented by the usual textbook assumption of 'helicopter money').2006, Philip Arestis, Malcolm C. Sawyer, A Handbook of Alternative Monetary Economics, page ix
    • A more fundamental defect in the argument that helicopter money will always resuscitate the economy is that it focuses exclusively on the logic of buyers while totally ignoring the logic of sellers.2018, Richard C. Koo, The Other Half of Macroeconomics and the Fate of Globalization

Origin of helicopter money

Coined by Milton Friedman in 1969 using the metaphor of money being dropped from the sky (out of nowhere).

Questions about helicopter money

What does helicopter money mean?
Helicopter money means money that is created and dispersed by the central bank.
What part of speech is helicopter money?
Helicopter money is a noun.

Words near helicopter money in the dictionary

  1. helicopter carrier
  2. helicopter carriers
  3. helicopter ear
  4. helicopter mom
  5. helicopter moms
  6. helicopter money
  7. helicopter parent
  8. helicopter parenting
  9. helicopter parents
  10. helicopter seed
  11. helicopter shot

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: helicopter money (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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