The European debt crisis is the shorthand term for Europe’s struggle to pay the debts it has built up in recent decades. It is an ongoing crisis that has been damaging the economy of the eurozone since early 2009, the time when a group of 10 central and eastern European banks asked for a bailout. For some countries in the eurozone, the crisis made it difficult or even impossible to repay their government debt without the assistance of third parties like the European Central Bank (ECB) or International Monetary Fund (IMF). Banks in the eurozone were undercapitalized and have faced liquidity and debt problems. Additionally, economic growth was slow in the whole of the eurozone and was unequally distributed across the member states. Five of the region’s countries – Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, and Spain – have failed to generate enough economic growth to make their ability to pay back bondholders the guarantee it was intended to be. Although these five were seen as being the countries in immediate danger of a possible default at the peak of the crisis in 2010-2011, the crisis has far-reaching consequences that extend beyond their borders to the world as a whole. In fact, the head of the Bank of England referred to it as “the most serious financial crisis at least since the 1930s, if not ever,” in October 2011.