“Thankfully there are noises on the fiscal front”, Nordea’s Martin Enlund and Andreas Steno Larsen wrote late last week, summarizing what is perhaps the market’s last hope to escape a fate snowbound in Albert Edwards’s “Ice Age” thesis.

It’s true – there are “noises” on the fiscal front, and those rumblings briefly (and we do emphasize briefly) dented the long-end rally in Germany earlier this month.

But skepticism abounds when it comes to whether Berlin will, in fact, loosen up the purse strings, and when it comes to Donald Trump and more tax cuts, it’s not clear how that’s feasible considering the latest CBO outlook which is, in a word, horrendous.

Read more: US Seen Hemorrhaging Red Ink As Deficit To Top $1 Trillion Sooner Than Expected

But it’s not just Germany and the US. As Enlund goes on to note, “the UK finance minister wants to ‘take advantage of low debt costs’, the Dutch government is considering a ‘major investment push’ and South Korea is seeking to boost its budget by 9%”.

Any such fiscal easing can’t come fast enough for bond bears. There are a million charts like the one below, but the overarching message is always the same: Bond bulls have had everything working for them of late, from the ongoing deterioration in the global growth outlook to plunging inflation expectations to the promise of perpetual monetary accommodation. It’s been a duration grab for the ages and the relentless hunt for yield has served to balloon the global stock of negative-yielding debt above $16 trillion.

(Credit Suisse)

“A significant push on the fiscal front would lower the pressure on central banks [and] this could become a game-changer for the fixed income market”, Nordea went on to say.

The point: With central bankers seemingly out of rabbits in their magic hats, there are only two real possibilities for stimulus going forward. Either politicians get to work on fiscal packages or monetary policy gets really, really weird – for lack of a better word.

Nordea’s Enlund underscores just how weird with some brief commentary and a couple of simple charts. He starts with a quick recap of how we got here:

Only a few years ago, central banks thought negative rates were impossible. Then they figured that the cost of storing and insuring physical cash (perhaps 1%/year) limited how low they could go (an implicit limit of -1%). Now, however, the idea of restricting cash usage to make even deeper negative rates possible has started to become mainstream, with the IMF publishing blog posts and working papers on the topic. Indeed, contrary to what one could hope, it may be that the era of unconventional monetary policy has only just begun.

Now, consider a little straightforward extrapolation.

Nordea notes that “if the trend since 1980 in G4 policy rates continues, we might see -4% in 2030 [and] the trend in the German 10-year yield since 1980 suggests it might reach -2%” by then.

(Nordea)

Before you write that off as silly or suggest this kind of extrapolation is too simplistic, do note that in a world where € corporates now have the luxury of conceptualizing of debt as an asset rather than a liability, nothing is “silly”. Half of the € IG market trades with negative yields.

And as far as extrapolation goes, the bond rally now looks set to enter its fourth decade, so maybe extrapolating makes sense here.

“If a central bank were to cut its deposit rate to -4% at some juncture and then keep it there for five years, why shouldn’t a 5-year bond trade with a similar negative yield?”, Enlund asks.

Again, fiscal stimulus now looks like the market’s last hope to escape a fate snowbound in Albert Edwards’s “Ice Age” thesis. Albert is surely prepared – he’s had two decades to get ready for it. Maybe, if we’re all nice enough to him, he’ll let us share his igloo and/or teach us how to ice fish.

Albert Edwards: This Isn’t A ‘Bond Bubble’, It’s ‘The Next Phase Of The Ice Age’