The song remains the same, only worse

At the beginning of this year, we wrote a piece called The Song Remains the Same. The basic message of the article was that we should expect the current environment of slow economic growth and low interest rates to persist. Given that developed world economies continue to struggle with structural issues such as large debt burdens and aging populations, we believed, at the time, that global monetary authorities would continue with their extraordinarily accommodating programmes and that interest rates would likely stay at (or near) their historically low levels.