Financial Press Review, 1 April

‘Surprise decision from the NBR for credits’, the Bursa reads. ‘The minimum cash reserve ratio for foreign currency passives has been decreased’.

‘NBR is releasing 1 billion Euro to banks’, the Ziarul Financiar reads. ‘Analysts see this decision as encouragement for credits and the economy implicitly (…) since there has been some inflation pressure piling up, which makes it impossible to reduce the key interest rate’. ‘Analysts already believe that the NBR will fail to meet the target inflation rate in 2011’, the daily points out.

All financial dailies discuss yesterday’s speech given by the US Ambassador at the Bucharest Stock Exchange. The Ziarul Financiar sums up Mark Gittenstein’s message in the headline ‘Privatize power through the Stock Exchange if you want to attract investment’.

‘Follow the Polish model of Stock Exchange privatizations’, a Bursa headline reads. ‘The Romanian power sector will need significant investment to set the Romanian economy in motion, instead of holding it back’, Gittenstein said adding that ‘this is not going to happen as long as these assets belong to state enterprises run by inexperienced people, who take decisions based on their best interest, instead of the company’s’, the daily reads.

The American Ambassador then criticized the current effort to reorganize power companies, comparing it to ‘trying to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic, because it does not take into account their basic problem: they are not being managed as business’, the Ziarul Financiar points out. The daily supports the Trade Register’s initiative to get itself the tax offence record of people who want to set up a company and believes this will ‘cut the red tape’, as is the opinion at the Association for Reforming the Tax System.

The Curierul Naţional prints an article entitled ‘We will live longer, but who will pay for our pensions?’ ‘Longer lives have a price’. According to the EU, Romania is the most unsustainable pension systems in Europe’. ‘The number of people over 60 will double until 2050, reaching 39.5 percent. Spending on pensions and healthcare is expected to increase to 23.2 percent of the GDP in 2060, over 13.1 percent in 2007’.

‘The state pension system is in desperate need of a reform, because we cannot support pensions anymore. The system is bankrupt, held alive by loans from international financial institutions. But what will happen when Romania starts to pay off its debt?’ The Curierul Naţional quotes Romanian Private Pension Funds' Association President Crinu Andănuţ.


Translated by: Gabriela Lungu
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University