Fed trying to prevent hedge funds from having to sell assets to raise cash (i.e., keep the bubble inflated)?
Some mutual funds tried something like that in the .com bubble. They had shareholders vote on changing the charter to allow the fund to borrow money to honor redemptions. Meaning of course that if 50% of the shares redeemed, the remaining shareholders would be levered 2:1 plus having interest to pay on the debt. Like you said... "anything to keep the bubble inflated".
The Fed looks like they're going to screw things up again. Unemployment is at multi-generation lows. They should be perfectly happy with the Japan-style steady state of low rates, low inflation, low unemployment and low growth, and take this opportunity to purge the system of some speculative risk. Instead they seem determined to turbo-charge a fundamentally justified secular markup in asset prices into a full-blown bubble, exactly as happened in the late 1990s.