The behavior of corporates and - especially - VC-backed ones was always out there (the dot-com bubble of 2000 was in a context of relatively high interest rate), but Ben Bernanke dumped gasoline on it through quantitative easing, as you rightly pointed out. By trying to save banks and a sluggish economy, the Fed enabled every growing distortions in corporate behavior since 2008. No wonder the 99% are pissed off. These attempts to “save the economy” resulted in ever-increasing exploitation of workers. I still think that it would have been better for the Fed to let a wave of bank bankruptcies sweep the US so that investors and management would be kept on their toes against bad corporate behavior.