European long-term interest rates & inflation

   According to wide-spread market and analyst expectations, today the European Central Bank in order to respond to the growing deflationary trends will launch a new Large-Scale Asset Purchase program (LSAP, or, so called, "Quantitatve Easing"). However, the massive purchases of assets (usually government bonds) by central banks not only increase inflation, but also create pressure on government bond yields, which in Europe are on lowest levels for last ten years (see the graph) and in core EMU countries are close to zero.

  Interestingly, that in recent years there was a clear relationship between the level of inflation and bond yields on country level: higher inflation rate leads, counterintuitively, to lower interest rates on government bonds (see the bubble chart below). A possible explanation for this is that the lower inflation in some european countries induced by low economic growth.

   On the other hand, the higher is the level of public debt, the higher are interest rates on government bonds. Thus, the ECB asset purchase program, on the one hand, will stimulate economic growth and inflation, and on the other hand, reduce the cost of debt service which may help to reduce total government debt levels in future. So ECB may create double impact on the real (inflation-adjusted) interest rate of government bonds, which may become negative again, as in 2011-2013 (see the ranking gadget on the left).

Sources: Long-term interest rate statistics for EU Member States, Monthly, Jan 1993 to December 2014,    World Bank Global Economic Monitor, January 2015, OECD Economic Outlook No 95 - December 2014