Between 2008 and 2020 it has been a common practice among main central banks to keep the policy rate at or around zero. Apart from the expected macroeconomic consequences described partly by liquidity trap theories and structural macroeconomic models discussing the effectiveness of economic policy at the zero lower bound (ZLB), moderate interest rates have a notable influence on the portfolio optimising decisions of economic actors as well. The paper thus endeavours to reveal the wealth effect at the ZLB. Firstly, it compares how the various monetary aggregates and sectoral portfolios changed in the USA and in the eurozone between 2000 and 2020 contrasting the empirical facts with the theoretical assumptions and the experience of the Japan’s lost decade. Secondly, it examines the impact of the common monetary policy at the ZLB on the portfolio structure of individual countries of the eurozone. Hierarchical cluster analysis is applied using Eurostat sectoral financial asset statistics for selected years between 2005 and 2019. After choosing the best asset-to-GDP variables of sectoral financial asset holdings, countries are separated in different clusters based on Squared Euclidean distance and variables are standardised to z-scores. The analysis revealed that low interest rates cause significant portfolio rearrangements in the eurozone as a whole. Moreover, there is much greater diversity between individual member states originally than the way monetary policy influenced differences in the portfolio composition of economic sectors, even some convergence between core and periphery countries is observable.