Euro area in the context of Monetary union

T2 is a financial market infrastructure that provides real-time gross settlement (RTGS) of payments, mostly in euros. It is operated by the European Central Bank and is the critical payments infrastructure of the euro area. With turnover in the trillions of euros every day, it is one of the largest payment systems in the world. It is one of three so-called TARGET Services, together with TARGET2-Securities (T2S) for securities and TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) for fast payments. The acronym TARGET stands for Trans-European Automated Real-time Gross-Settlement Express Transfer.

T2 replaced its predecessor RTGS system, TARGET2 (itself introduced in 2007-2008), on 20 March 2023.

Price stability is a goal of monetary and fiscal policy aiming to support sustainable rates of economic activity. Policy is set to maintain a very low rate of inflation or deflation. For example, the European Central Bank (ECB) describes price stability as a year-on-year increase in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) for the Euro area of below 2%. However, by referring to "an increase in the HICP of below 2%" the ECB makes clear that not only persistent inflation above 2% but also deflation (i.e. a persistent decrease of the general price level) are inconsistent with the goal of price stability.

In the United States, the Federal Reserve Act (as amended in 1977) directs the Federal Reserve to pursue policies promoting "maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates". The Fed long ago determined that the best way to meet those mandates is to target a rate of inflation of around 2%; in 2011 it officially adopted a 2% annual increase in the personal consumption expenditures price index (often called PCE inflation) as the target. Since the mid-trend 1990s, the Federal Reserve's measure of the inflation trend averaged 1.7%, a mere 0.3% shy of the Federal Open Market Committee’s 2% target for overall PCE inflation. Trend inflation as measured by the price index of core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) – that is, excluding food and energy – has fluctuated between 1.2% and 2.3% over the past 20 years.

TARGET Services (for Transeuropean Automated Real-time Gross-settlement Express Transfer) are payment services operated by the Eurosystem for the euro area and beyond on its proprietary financial market infrastructures.

As of late 2024, TARGET Services included T2 for large payments (which replaced TARGET2 in 2023), TARGET2-Securities (T2S) for securities transactions, and TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) for instant payments. A fourth service, the Eurosystem Collateral Management System (ECMS), is to complement the TARGET suite in mid-June 2025.

The European debt crisis, often also referred to as the eurozone crisis or the European sovereign debt crisis, was a multi-year debt crisis that took place in the European Union (EU) from 2009 until the mid to late 2010s that made it difficult or impossible for some countries in the euro area to repay or refinance their government debt without the assistance of third parties.

The European sovereign debt crisis resulted from the structural problem of the eurozone and a combination of complex factors, including the globalisation of finance; easy credit conditions during the 2002–2008 period that encouraged high-risk lending and borrowing practices; the 2008 financial crisis; international trade imbalances; real-estate bubbles that have since burst; the Great Recession; fiscal policy choices related to government revenues and expenses; and approaches used by nations to bail out troubled banking industries and private bondholders, assuming private debt burdens or socialising losses.