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When a central bank buys government bonds from pension funds, insurers and other investors, it hands them new deposits and takes away safe assets. Sellers do not spend this money on goods; they reinvest it in riskier assets such as equities, corporate bonds and property. This pushes up asset prices and pushes down yields, and that repricing is the main way QE reaches the economy.
Financial and property wealth is concentrated among older and richer households, so inflating asset prices mostly benefits people who already own assets. The benefit to everyone else comes indirectly, through jobs and wages, and arrives weaker and later. The result is that a policy meant to support the whole economy shifted relative wealth toward the top.
QE's new money lands in commercial banks' reserve accounts at the central bank. Banks do not lend these reserves to households or firms. Commercial banks create deposits when they make loans, limited by borrower demand, capital and risk appetite rather than by how many reserves they hold, so piling up reserves did not by itself produce the lending boom the money-multiplier model predicted.
QE is an asset swap: the private sector gives up a bond and receives money, so its net wealth is unchanged and only its portfolio changes. People's QE, or helicopter money, is a transfer: households receive new money and give nothing back, so their net financial assets rise. Because the transfer raises spendable income directly, it acts on demand through consumption rather than through asset prices.
Money sent straight to households is more likely to be spent, so it produces more demand per pound created than QE. That makes inflation a matter of dosage rather than a reason to rule the tool out.
Every choice about where central bank money enters the economy, whether bond markets, banks or households, determines who benefits first and most. Treating that entry point as a technical detail lets unelected institutions make large distributional choices without democratic scrutiny. It also means that choosing households as the entry point is a legitimate policy option, not a radical break.