> Is inflation really never going to show again?
In developed economies money is being removed nearly as fast as it's being added, in the form of going into the blackhole of low to negative yielding paper. It's removing a present ~$17 trillion of capital that could otherwise be sloshing around pressing inflation higher. That's an extraordinary amount of money that has largely been rendered non-impacting. There are only a few areas where you see any inflationary pressure in the US, such as in assets like equities and real-estate, due to the Fed rates. In that case you've got people with immense collective free capital pressing aggressively upward on prices (willing to pay a high premium to try to get a return beyond what eg treasuries are offering).
It's why Japan can never spark traditional inflation (nor achieve any growth). Their epic pile of low yield debt has sucked a lot of the loose capital out of their economy. It's a giant pile of non-productive, non-active, ineffectual capital. Instead of going toward wage pressure / competition, growth, business formation & loans, VC, productivity investments, R&D, et al.
If you could unleash $20-$30 trillion of increasingly low yielding debt back into the US economy, inflation would skyrocket and it would demand far higher rates to control inflationary pressure.
It takes several things working in tandem to result in this unusual outcome. Countries outside of the developed world - the first tier, affluent economies - have a near impossible time achieving such low or negative yields, and lack of inflationary pressure.