This caught by surprise those observers who had long anticipated that the yield curve after aggregation would translate into a sort of arithmetic average of the curves defined on the legacy currencies, rather than into the benchmark set by the most credible previous national currencies.
In parallel, long-term inflation expectations aligned with the low  2  BIS Review 52/2008  levels of the best performing economies that were merged into the euro. As a result, in some euro area countries, short-, medium- and long-term market interest rates fell to levels that had not been seen since the long-gone days of the gold standard.