Welcome to our exchanges at Goldman Sachs Markets Update for Friday, February 19th.

Each week we check in with a leader across the firm to get a quick take on what they're watching in markets.

I'm Jake Seaward, Global Head of Corporate Communications here at the firm.

Today we're going to talk about the prospects for inflation and its impact on markets.

We're joined by Peter Oppenheimer, chief

global equity strategist and head of macro research in Europe who's going to be

talking about his new research. Peter, welcome back to the program.

Thank you, Jay. Good to be here.

Nice to see you. So in the latest research you put out, you say that we may be heading towards more

reflationary environment than we've seen really since the financial crisis in 2009. What's behind that thesis?

Well I think the main thing to emphasize that we're entering a period that is likely to be

characterized by a combination of factors that we just simply haven't seen in what was a very deflationary-led era post the financial crisis.

So over the last decade or more now, inflation has tended to trend

downwards globally, sober bond yields which reach record low levels. Growth did

recover after the financial crisis but was not very synchronized globally and it wasn't

particularly strong especially outside of the US you had the banking crisis the

sovereign debt crisis the collapse in commodity markets, they were all central to that

disinflationary environment that we saw.

And so too were the attempts to remember to tighten fiscal policy and introduce austerity in many countries, particularly in Europe.

And bear in mind that also the last decade were very much dominated by the digitization

of different industries

that also led to more disinflationary pressures.

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