Central bank's Vasilescu: The entire collapse of the national currency was worth 2 bani

The collapse of the national currency, which has gone from 4.7 RON to 4.8 RON per euro, is worth 2 bani (the lowest subdivision of the Romanian currency, 100 bani equals 1 RON - e.n.), and presently it doesn't even reach that, said on Sunday Adrian Vasilescu, strategy consultant at the National Bank of Romania.

"There is much talk these days. The phrases used are as follows: the RON - EUR rate has reached a historical maximum, the national currency is crashing, as well as variations of those phrases. The entire collapse of the national currency, there used to be a threshold, February 20 to 21. That threshold was called by the press the psychological threshold because the RON - EUR rate went from 4.7 to 4.8. And this passing was called the psychological threshold. And since then, from February 20 to 21 and today there wasn't a God-given moment in which the press did not write on the idea that the national currency is crashing and the historical maximum. This entire crash was worth two bani. And in the days that followed it dropped under two bani because there were no days of depreciation of national currency, there were combinations. One day it went down, one day it went up. The net is in favor of depreciation, but the value of this depreciation now does not reach even two bani. It's below two bani," said Adrian Vasilescu at Digi 24.

Asked about the reasons for which we have this depreciation of the exchange rate, he mentioned that there are several factors, inflation being one of the causes.

" (...) since October 1, 2017, so two years and five months ago, Romania is in an inflation cycle. This inflation cycle had a dangerous path at one point, it grew to 5.4 in May 2018, a very high level of inflation given that many countries are fighting deflation," said Adrian Vasilescu.

Furthermore, he mentioned that the BNR does not set the RON - EUR rate, but calculates it.AGERPRES