Financial Press, 10 December 2010

Even though Laurence Peter claimed that an economist is an expert who tomorrow would know why the things he had predicted did not happen today, most analysts quoted by the Ziarul Financiar forecast than the economic recovery remains fragile, given the fiscal adjustment launched at this year’s mid, the increasing unemployment and the reducing capital inflows.

And the key to the sustainable economic growth recovery is mainly in the infrastructure investment and applying of the structural reforms.

The 2010 official forecast on the economy has gone from a GDP growth of 1.3 percent early this year, to a decrease of 0.5 percent at the end of May and down to 1.9 percent at the end of the year.

The domestic consumption was also seen before the announcement of the austerity measures as the main obstacle of the economic recovery.

However, most expectations have been directed towards the exports, which went into a positive territory at the end of last year, thereby helping to improve the economic downturn.

And unwillingly we go back to gold, which reached new historic highs this week at the exchange rate, rising to 147 lei per gram, 40 percent more than at the beginning of the year.

While the alternative of gold investments is traditionally seen as a ‘safety’ and protection one against inflation, 2010 is the second consecutive year which the precious metal offers the investors yields hard to beat.

Also from the pages of the same paper we learn that the private pension funds prefer not to disclose their investment portfolios so that almost five million Romanians, who were forced to contribute to the private pensions schemes, can not know at this point in what have their contributions been invested.

Unlike the mutual funds, which make their portfolios public every six months, the pension funds privately administrated do not publish any detailed statements regarding the investments.

Thus, as the fund assets grow, the participants in the private pensions schemes could end up indirectly financed more companies in Austria, Poland and Western Europe than in Romanian companies without even knowing it.

The Curierul Naţional announces us that Santa Claus came sooner for the Romanian drivers who have received as presents not highways or roads without potholes, but lower tariffs at the compulsory driving insurance in the coming year.

Thus, most insurers in the market have already announced that several types of discounts would be applied to the policies concluded for 2011.

Also, the same newspaper states that the government has approved the riles for implementing the public-private partnership law, which sets the criteria for the selection of the firms aiming to participate in the projects carried out in such a system, the entrepreneurs repeatedly asking for the need of such a framework.

The Bursa newspaper makes public the fact that in the future world oil quotation might temporarily fall to 60 dollars per barrel, a situation which would have a profound negative impact on Russia’s economy – dependent on the prices of the international energy market.

Currently, the U.S. market quotation of crude oil is around 90 dollars per barrel, with an increasing trend in the conditions under which the U.S. oil inventories fell last week as the Energy Department has announced.

Translated by Iulia Florescu
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University