> There was substantial action towards both of those ends, more than any other country.
I just don't think that's true. From what I understand, they payroll support was extremely difficult to get for small businesses, and the majority went to large corporations who had the connections and the bandwidth to deal with the bureaucracy. Even the Cares checks took weeks to arrive in the hands of people without direct deposit.
By contrast, I am currently living in Germany, and I have friends who are freelancers and they had support funds in their bank accounts less than a week after the lockdown started. Also there was already legal machinery in place to avoid job losses which was put in place in 2008 and activated almost immediately.
> Other countries are not really as comparable because we're the only rich developed country to have failed so badly at containing it (early on, in the next few months some of Europe will follow us).
We will have to see, but I'm doubtful this is the case. In Germany for example we still have aggressive contract tracing, and we've already seen containment measures implemented successfully. We have not seen the particular failures in leadership which occurred in the US, and though we may indeed see a second wave, I'm not sure why we should expect that to go worse now that there's improved information and the population has already dealt with this once I'm not sure why we should expect this to go worse the second time.
> Delaying the obligation is better because it means that people won't be evicted if they can't meet the payments even with the governmental support
Why are these options mutually exclusive? You could provide direct support to tenants and also prevent evictions. This would limit the extent to which you are creating a future financial obligation which out-of-work tenants will have no way of meeting.
> I agree that Fed actions impact equity prices, I disagree that that is a bad thing for the economy.
I never said rising equity prices were a bad thing for the economy. My concern is that if we optimize the recovery effort for increasing equity prices, but fail to address other risks, like lack of employment and the creation of housing debt, we could be setting ourselves up for failure in the medium term. If we managed to keep people employed and in their homes and also saw rising equity prices I would have no such concern.