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And had Jane been living in the euro area today, in Germany for example, she would only have been able to invest for the long term at a negative interest rate – the 30 year bund yielded minus 0.27% in August. Nominal interest rates do vary through time of course. Since the Napoleonic wars and outside wartime, UK long term nominal rates moved mainly in a 2-5% range until the decades of inflation following the Second World War, during which they rose above 15%, before falling back as inflation was brought under control. They have been falling ever since. The fall in long rates is a phenomenon that has been building since the late 1980s, gathering pace after the financial crisis (Chart 1). During the past couple of months, UK long nominal rates have dropped to around, and sometimes even below, 1%. They have not been this low in the past 200 years. The same is true, more generally, for other advanced economies. 1 See Avery Jones (2019). 2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  2  Some of this likely reflects low current and expected inflation. But it is a great deal more than just an inflation story. Long term real rates – in the United Kingdom and in other advanced economies – are extremely low and indeed are negative. I want to look briefly today at why we are in a period of low interest rates and why we might expect it to persist – ‘low for long’ in other words.