It's like an oil company shorting oil, to hedge the risk of the market moving against them, before they can sell their inventory.
The problem is that the fed is now buying every asset under the sun, and instead of their loan and their short being inversely correlated, they are now uncorrelated, which is killing them.
The equivalent would be the oil company's oil dropping in price... While the price of oil increases, this killing their short. This doesn't really happen in properly functioning markets, but markets currently have huge liquidity problems.
At least, that's what it sounds like.