Interest rate premiums on bonds were pushed back during the pandemic and mortgage ratesfell marginally Basis points and per cent  Note. The bond rates refer to a 5 year maturity, difference against the expected policy rate (see footnote 7). Mortgage rates are an average of actual rates for new and renegotiated mortgages from Länsförsäkringar Bank, Nordea, SBAB, SEB, SHB and Swedbank. Sources: Bloomberg, Macrobond, Refinitiv, respective mortgage agents and the Riksbank. The housing market developed unexpectedly strongly during the pandemic Third, there are indications that the unusually low risk premiums for covered and corporate bonds had an impact on the behaviour of households and companies. The right panel in Figure 9 shows that the interest rate on household mortgage loans fell marginally in 2020 and 2021, despite the Riksbank having raised the policy rate just before the pandemic. In spring 2020, we feared that the housing and property markets – where indebtedness was high and where growth had been rapid – could be severely affected by the pandemic, which could ultimately jeopardise financial stability.24 However, the support measures, partly through expectations of continued low interest rates and easing the amortisation requirements from Finansinspektionen, seem instead  22  See Alsterlind (2021) for a more detailed analysis of how the risk premiums on covered bonds disappeared when the Riksbank's purchases began.
The recent rapid interest rate increases show instead that the central banks do not hesitate to raise interest rates, despite the fact that this entails losses on their balance sheets. Bernanke (2020) says that the signalling channel has been important, but thinks that it works differently. According to him, market participants rely more on central banks' communication on future asset purchases than on their communication on future interest rate decisions. In addition, they expect the central bank not to raise the policy rate while an asset purchase programme is still in progress. By communicating a purchase programme with a certain duration, the central bank can therefore keep interest rate expectations low.18 Signalling in this way has hardly been important in Sweden, at least not as a conscious strategy on the part of the Riksbank. This is because the market's interest rate expectations during much of this period were lower than the forecast for the policy rate published by the Riksbank. This was most evident when the purchases started in February 2015, as shown in Figure 6. If our ambition was to push down expectations of the future policy rate, this should have been reflected in a lower forecast for the policy rate.19  18 I find it difficult to see the logic of this reasoning (why is central banks' communication on asset purchases  more credible than their communication on interest rates?) but recognise it from expectations that I have sometimes heard expressed by market participants.