To the extent that households try to cushion their prospective loss of retirement income with private provisioning, they have to assume additional investment and market risk. Corporate pension plans migrating from defined benefits to defined contributions also burden households directly with market risk. As ultimate bearers of all financial risk, private households also feature as the ultimate absorbers of shocks to the financial system.
5  In the 2000s, the average growth rate recovered slightly, and stayed at 1.7 percent until 2007 before the collapse of Lehman Brothers. BIS Review 118/2010  1  the peak of land prices (Chart 3). 6 Overnight interest rates came down to 0.5 percent and virtually reached zero interest rates in 1995, four years after the BOJ started the policy rate reductions.