As I said at the outset, the extent to which provision is made for paying pensions by funding (through pillars one, two or three), and the extent to which we rely on public pay-as-you-go schemes, is of central importance to the supply of finance. At the present moment, public pay-as-you-go schemes predominate, particularly in Europe. Their future is, however, uncertain.
Using several models, ECB staff estimated that, without our policies, inflation would have been a third of a percent negative in 2015 and would have stayed significantly negative throughout 2016, which would mean that we would have been in permanent deflation since last year. This is a significant result.