If we don't count money printing, europe would probably be in an even worse shape. Remember that the interest rates in the big Western European countries have been negative for years with still almost no economic growth, and that was pre-covid! Even the FED isn't technically directly buying US bonds from the market like the ECB does to prop up the debt sales of its weaker members. Even the historically low current FED rates, I think are still higher than the peak of most European central banks rates of the past 5 years. Again, all of that did very little to prop up their economy (which usually indicates it's pretty zombified) so they couldn't even start hiking the rates back in 2018-2019 like the FED did. That means they are now stuck with very few "easy" ways to recover from 2020.

I know you are just joking, but the sheer irony of a money printer joke in this context was just too much for me to not react :')