[jka]

It feels like there could be perverse incentives developing here.

There's a lot of discussion about providing cash bonuses to employees and perhaps citizens across the U.S.

Encouraging people to put that money back into the stock market could be sold on the notion that "we're reaching a bottom; join the economy on the way back up, and you'll help the recovery while profiting".

If that works as intended, then in the short term that would seem good.

However there could be a significant number of stocks which don't recover. And the whole process would then essentially signal that "crisis is good for these types of business", leading to continued ascent of crisis-oriented businesses, and, as a side-effect, more incentive for crises.

This may be a cynical or slanted perspective, and perhaps a correctly-functioning market avoids this trend somehow. Any opinions and discussion would be appreciated.

[umanwizard]

Why would you expect them to encourage people to put the money into the stock market?

If the government wanted to print money to make the stock market go up, it could do so directly. That's not the point of giving money to all citizens.

[jka]

The concern is that an artifically-created economic recovery could be a political goal, and might not align with the interests of humanitarian response; nor indeed with longer-term genuine economic recovery.

You're no doubt correct that the same result could likely be achieved in other ways too.