However, the legal setting in which these company pension funds have to operate, varies between the two countries. In the US, company pension funds are rarely financially separate from the sponsor company, so that pension assets are ill-protected against employer bankruptcy.
Today, by contrast, it is clear that the Fed and the ECB, which have both made substantial recourse to unconventional measures, though differing in scale and modalities, were simply pursuing their own statutory objectives, by providing stimulus when shortterm interest rates were at the zero lower bound or by restoring the viability of the monetary policy transmission mechanism.