I will now turn to three specific remarks of global relevance, before I make two concluding observations that are specific to the euro area. A. General remarks  At a global level, the financial crisis created an environment in which many central banks resorted to unconventional measures because the conventional instrument, the short-term policy rate, had become constrained by the lower bound.
In the jargon of papers written before the crisis, it is simple to say what happened: many central banks hit the famous zero lower bound (ZLB). The euro area, as I will mention at the end, reached the lower bound through a different avenue. And the end point of that journey, as you know, was not zero, but a negative point.