I agree with the rest of your comment, though. The US public markets reward creative accounting and mortgaging the future for quarterly gains. GE and Jack Welch are a great historical example.

I also think a significant influence on the Fed was a financialized business community demanding 0% interest.

This is the one upside of chaos monkey crashing the economy. They aren't going to be able to drive rates back to zero in the next four years.

It doesn't - if you look at the situation in real terms, the amount of resources available to invest is about the same (probably shrinking because some are diverted to people who aren't creditworthy and consume them). So the major effect of artificially low interest rates is to add a whole heap of artificially supported highly wasteful companies to the mix.

All that changes is the market started rewarding people with access to credit instead of people who were responsible and effective. The credit people aren't particularly capable and it'd be better if they had been forced out.

US businesses were free to do the same over the past low interest environment, but we did not have the same incentives, not inclinations in terms of prevailing business strategic appetite for factories. In contrast, for big tech, there was interest and appetite for it and significant capability with protective moats were built - but one could argue that software based tech moats may be faster to bypass.