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Central banks and investors critically monitor market-based inflation measures as key indicators for medium-term inflation expectations. Market-based measures of inflation expectations have experienced a sharp decline over 2019. The euro 5y5y inflation-linked swap rate has fallen from 1.8 percent at the beginning of 2019 to a level of around 1.2 percent at year’s end. This sharp decline raises the question what drives the low market-based inflation measures. We show that a large part of this decline is likely to be attributed to a fall in the inflation risk premium. This implies that nominal bonds are no longer an ‘inflation bet’ but rather a ‘deflation hedge

Did the Federal Reserves’ Quantitative Easing (QE) in the aftermath of the financial crisis have macroeconomic effects? To answer this question, the authors estimate a large-scale DSGE model over the sample from 1998 to 2020, including data of the Fed’s balance sheet. The authors allow for QE to affect the economy via multiple channels that arise from several financial frictions. Their nonlinear Bayesian likelihood approach fully accounts for the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. They find that between 2009 to 2015, QE increased output by about 1.2 percent. This reflects a net increase in investment of nearly 9 percent, that was accompanied by a 0.7 percent drop in aggregate consumption. Both, government bond and capital asset purchases were effective in improving financing conditions. Especially capital asset purchases significantly facilitated new investment and increased the production capacity. Against the backdrop of a fall in consumption, supply side effects dominated which led to a mild disinflationary effect of about 0.25 percent annually.