Reserve Bank of Australia governor Glenn Stevens has slammed calls for central banks to directly pump cash into the pockets of households and governments to resurrect moribund global economic growth, warning that such "helicopter money" drops would be almost impossible to stop once they start.

"Are we that desperate," Mr Stevens said in a speech in New York on Tuesday, in which he also challenged a growing view that the world is suffering from an obsessive desire to save over investment, a growth-retarding trend dubbed the great "secular stagnation" by figures such as Barack Obama's former top economic advisor Lawrence Summers.