A lot of money in the US went to businesses through the PPP and similar programs. That was mostly a good thing as far as keeping businesses from closing or laying off workers. But I think pumping up non-productive assets was the second-order effect, where tons of stimulus money that people didn’t need immediately got dumped into speculative stocks, real estate, etc. the alternative would have been keeping it in savings accounts earning 0.01% while you saw all your friends “getting rich” YOLOing on meme stocks.