In the subsequent years, the trauma that the debt crisis had caused for the banks located in the vulnerable countries triggered among those banks a drawn-out process of deleveraging aimed at shedding the most risky components of their balance sheets: loans to the economy.
Gross domestic product (GDP) collapsed at a roughly 31.5 percent annual rate in the second quarter of 2020, more than 22 million jobs were lost in March and April, and the unemployment rate rose from a 50-year low of 3.5 percent in February to almost 15 percent in April.