Romania has given up on a time horizon for switching over to the single European currency, the euro, when it dropped a fiscal-budgetary target, and the decision was a political one, Governor of the National Bank of Romania (BNR) Mugur Isarescu said on Tuesday.
„The horizon was dropped when a fiscal, fiscal-budgetary target was dropped. That was a political decision. We met the conditions in 2013, 2014, 2015. At that time, a first deputy governor of the National Bank was also finance minister… It was also a political decision, President Basescu had even set this target. But then it was politically considered that we have too little public debt and that we can take advantage of that. And most of the parties and governments that were there no longer held on to this fiscal target. I have experienced this, so I can speak freely. There was not a single party that showed. And here the debate must calm down, because everyone went along this line, to press, more or less really, on the fiscal stimulus, by the way, they had all learned what the Laffer curve is. It does not work any time any way. It works when you have very high taxes, when they are already low, it no longer produces any effect. I made a digression. And since 2018, the National Bank has not been able to collaborate. It was the last meeting, if I remember, it was at the Romanian Academy, on switching to the euro. And we also gave up all the committees. We had three committees, including a technical one, speaking of the cash side, how to bring cash into the country, how to distribute euro cash. So we were ahead. Now, if the fiscal correction means five or seven years, it means that in 5-7 years’ time we will still be discussing,” Isarescu told a news conference on Tuesday where he unveiled BNR’s latest quarterly inflation report.
Cristian Popa, chair of the Numismatic Commission of the National Bank of Romania and member of the bank’s Board of Directors, recently told AGERPRES that Romania will have, by the end of this year, all the technological equipment necessary for printing euro banknotes.
AGERPRES
