Or a government printing money to hire private contractors, completely disregarding its ability do anything on its own.
To some extent, this is the curse of being the creator of the global reserve currency. The US government can, in theory, print as much money as it wants and pay off whoever it wants to do whatever it wants. This also extends to the academic and financial (VC) sectors, because a lot of that liquidity comes directly from the Government/Fed.
Unfortunately this leads to a culture of corruption (who gets the grants/contracts/funding?) and widespread fraud. This causes the ROI of money printing to go down, the money printer accelerates and we get inflation too.
