A financial collapse on top of a demand shock wouldn't have helped. This is speculation but Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank were probably at risk of collapsing, thereby tanking the market for CLOs and sparking a wave of corporate bankruptcies and bank failures. In order to prevent this and restore confidence, the fed went all out. There's always waste involved but I'm hesitant to call the whole thing a waste without knowing what the Fed knows.

Do agree on unemployment though. The overhead of administering the program is nonsensical. Florida purposefully designed its systems to deny as many claims as possible. The idea of designing government systems as terribly as possible so that people hate the government is holding us back in times of crisis.

UBI payments simplify the whole thing.