Financial Press Review, December 14

The Ziarul Financiar reads: ‘Insurance market in shock!’, regarding the passing of the law that eliminates the necessity for owners who have already bought an optional insurance that covers flood, earthquake and landslides damages to purchase a compulsory house insurance policy’.

Therefore, companies selling compulsory insurance could lose bonuses worth over 30 million euros, which puts at risk the system operation or could even lead to a tax increase’.

Under the headline ‘”Zombie” projects’ in Bucharest worth one billion euros’, the Curierul Naţional claims that ‘the house estate market in Bucharest is flooded with unfinished and unstarted investments’, due to the lack of funds.

‘The main cause lies in banks not settling bad loans. (…) Banks should take responsibility for these losses and let others take over the projects in order to finish them. This may never happen if they leave it for later’, writes the aforementioned daily, emphasizing that ‘for now, even the average price per square metre of land is the highest in the area’.

The Ziarul Financiar asks: ‘Do Romanians have any money left to save?’. The low incomes and the inflation increase leave little money in the pockets of citizens’, who have started to think so rarely about saving’. And this happens although ‘the need for saving continues to be high, taking into account that future incomes or job safety uncertainties keep persisting’.

‘The State could do more to encourage saving by offering fiscal facilities to the employees who have a life insurance policy or contribute to an optional private pension fund’. Field specialists have tried to prove to regulators that ‘it would be best to borrow money from people on a long term – by means of life insurance, pensions – rather than from external sources’.

The daily Bursa prints a GFK study, which concludes that Romanians save less also because they are poorly informed on the banking system.

The Economistul reads: ‘Only 6 percent of Romanians are correctly informed’. An article entitled ‘After stealing our summer, Bulgarians steal our winter too’, in the Curierul National, reveals that Bulgaria is a bigger attraction in the cold season because of the better sky infrastructure and the price-quality ratio more advantageous to the rising prices in our country.

In another season-related subject, that of gifts, the Curierul National writes that, ‘despite tickets and warnings issued by the Consumer Protection inspectors, merchants continue to sell dangerous toys for children. As in the previous year, half of the merchants were fined for disobeying safety regulations for toys.’ 249 toys were discontinued because they could have suffocated or strangulated children.

The daily Bursa publishes an article which informs us that ‘more than half of Bucharest’s old city centre buildings that were not rehabilitated risk collapse in case of an earthquake with a magnitude of more than 7 degrees on the Richter scale.’ Ştefan Dumitraşcu, chief architect of Bucharest’s District 3, stated.

Translated by Ciocănel Tudor and Raluca Mizdrea
MA Students, MTTLC, Bucharest University