The current environment is characterized by low real rates and by policy rates close to or at their effective lower bound in all major financial areas. We analyze these unusual economic conditions from a secular perspective using data on aggregate consumption, wealth and asset returns. Our...

In the light of new theoretical and empirical work on the Permanent Income Hypothesis we tackle earlier findings for German data, which reject its validity given a large fraction of liquidity constrained consumers. Starting from a standard short run approach we do not find evidence for excess...