Quatre mois après le début du QE de la BCE, 1,5 trilions de fonds d’état offrent encore des taux négatifs. Cela représente 23% du marché total. Le marché n’est visiblement pas convaincu de l’efficacité des mesures de Draghi, il ne croit ni à l’inflation, ni au retour de la croissance.

« More than four months after the European Central Bank started its bond-buying program to funnel money into the economy, $1.5 trillion of securities issued by governments in the region pay less than zero, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s equivalent to 23 percent of that market.

“Investors have no choice but to get used to negative yields,” said Ciaran O’Hagan, head of European rates strategy at Societe Generale SA in Paris. “It’s not an abnormality any more. This time, I think they are set to stay lower for longer.”

Yields on French two-year securities slid on Aug. 6 to less than the minus 0.2 percent the ECB charges lenders to park excess cash with it overnight. German yields are less than zero for notes with maturities of as long as four years.

Negative yields mean investors who hold them to maturity are effectively giving some of their money away in return for keeping it safe relative to risker securities that are more geared toward the prosperity of companies and countries.
Reflecting Concerns

The International Monetary Fund said in a report on July 27 there was a subdued outlook for the euro region because of a “chronic” lack of demand and weak productivity. Its growth potential had dropped to about 1 percent a year.

“The market is perhaps not convinced about the recovery and the return of inflation,” said Elwin de Groot, a senior market economist at Rabobank International in Utrecht, Netherlands. “This negative yields story for a significant part of the curve is a reflection of that uncertainty.”

Euro-area government notes maturing between one and three years eked out a return of 0.3 percent since the end of June through Aug. 7, according to the Merrill Lynch indexes.

The Bloomberg Eurozone Sovereign Bond Index jumped 2.4 percent last month, the biggest gain since April 2013, and the first positive returns since March this year, when the ECB started its 60 billion-euro ($65 billion) a month QE program.

The renewed appetite for holding euro-area bonds, including those with no yield, was supported by other gauges showing a drop in inflation expectations and a worsening growth outlook. June retail sales in the region slumped by the most in nine months, a report showed last week.

A market metric identified by ECB President Mario Draghi as a benchmark for the euro area’s inflation outlook dropped this week to the lowest since May. At 1.74 percent, the so-called five-year, five-year forward swap rate showed no prospect of inflation hitting the ECB’s 2 percent target.

“The ECB is now comfortably perceived to continue the program through to September next year at a minimum,” Mike Amey, a London-based fund manager at Pacific Investment Management Co., said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “The Pulse” with Francine Lacqua.