> yes, low interest rates are here to stay most likely, because of all the extremely wealthy retirement funds of aging populations all over the developed world are buying safe assets, so the US Treasury can sell a lot of bonds.
Isn't it also dependent on inflation? Higher inflation = higher bond yields
It's unsurprisingly a bit more complex than that, but yes. The mechanism is something like
general price level increase accelerates (inflation overshoots the target) -> central banks act to cool the economy (they conduct open market operations to remove liquidity, increase various knobs like interest-paid-on-reserves, basically the opposite of "quantitative easing") -> this has a knock on effect on corporate and governmental bond auctions -> bond interest rates go up
but this is a "closed loop" because the end result is that "inflation creeps back down to/below target level", and then bond yields go back to where they were and it seems that's mostly a function of the appetite for safe assets.
of course this might all be irrelevant if central banks basically switch to "nominal GDP targeting"
Isn't it also dependent on inflation? Higher inflation = higher bond yields