> A little tinfoil birdie told me

I appreciate your willingness to consider possibilities like this, but I think it really is tinfoil in this case.

> Market hiccups? Use a pandemic panic to justify printing a ton of money.

This gets cause and effect wrong. Wikipedia reminds:

> The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020, and first referred to it as a pandemic on 11 March 2020.[3][4]

Markets were doing well in Jan 2020 until people started noticing the case numbers and speculating about the WHO's judgement. They were on a bull run before that — up almost 29% in the 2019 calendar year — which was largely a recovery from problems at the end of 2018.

So the market was only hiccuping because of existing panic over the pandemic (including people reasonably pricing in risk that pandemic would be officially declared; the "social distancing" policies and business closures were quite telegraphed).

> Printed too much money? Distribute it to the "right" people through a hiring frenzy

This is just naturally what would happen.

> Money ran out

It's more that people started devaluing money because of how much was printed, so interest rates were controlled to avoid a hyperinflationary spiral. It could have gone much worse (see: early 70s until early 80s). Powell did an impressive job to engineer the desired "soft landing", but I personally was surprised and displeased that they waited that long to reach for the brakes. (It came across that there was a reluctance to trust early vague inflation signals, despite what should have been a high prior on their correctness given recent policy.)