Radu Craciun

And that will happen irrespective of the political leanings of the party. This should not take us by surprise. It comes with the procyclical policies which have been the mainstay of Romania`s development over the last decades, a country that boasts the highest level of economic volatility in the EU. It brought on record growth […]

Romania has a new target date to join the eurozone:2024. That was an occasion for me to update the graph that tracks the many deadlines to join the eurozone that Romania has had over the years. The arrows start from when the announcement was made and stop in the expected year of accession. As you […]

No business in the world is possible unless one condition is met: that both clients and shareholders perceive it as being useful to them. Should one of the two partners fail to see the benefit is enough to start questioning its future. Bloomberg announced that the treason charge against supermarkets by president Erdogan for their […]

“Somebody asked me the other day if I saw a threat of a self-induced crisis in Romania despite a stable international environment. A legitimate question because, in my opinion, if the 2008 world crisis hadn`t happened Romania might have been carried on with the massive current account deficit at the time. Because capital inflows would […]

I know that it sounds grand and dramatic. Mainly in Romanian, as in the Anglo-Saxon financial literature the notion of „wealth destruction” does not herald a piece of tabloid news. The concept is as serious as it gets, discussed in earnest and debated even at academic tables. A Reuters title announced that 2008 alone saw […]

In a discussion I had before the Emergency Ordinance (EM) issued by the Romania Government bringing a whole host of new taxes and duties was voted in, an important person was telling me that: “To assume that a political decision will be overturned based on technical grounds is unconceivable. This has never happened before”. Here […]

In theory, the NBR (National Bank of Romania) has been aiming to hit inflation targets for more than a decade. In other words, every year it tried to stay inside the inflation range that it had previously announced. But there is quite a gap between theory and practice which is by no means a narrow […]