♦ How does the banks help the Romanian economy on the recession's lip?
The Romanian economy has braked strongly, and the future package of adjusting the budget deficit, which may include cutting and/or increasing taxes, has a recessionary effect, larger or smaller, depending on the measures to be taken. Under these conditions, the lack of appetite of banks to credited companies, to finance the economy, and the big interest hangs as an additional burden, which does not help the economy to avoid the recession. An important question that arises is how will banks the economy of Romania will help, on the lip of the recession, how will they contribute to the growth of GDP? Will banks creduted the companies more or will they retire from the real economy and will rely on government securities? A BNR official even recently characterized the Romanian banks as «Lazy», comfortable, criticizing their lack of appetite for lending. In the last 10 years, the share in GDP of loans for companies has decreased from 16% to 12% of GDP, compared to Hungary where it is 50% or Austria where it is over 100% of GDP. In recent years there has been a decoupling between the banking system and the economy. In contrast, the relationship between the state and the banks has consolidated a lot over recent years in terms of financing. While the profit of the banking system has been on an upward slope, reaching a new record every year, the economic growth has broken in recent years. The profit at the level of the banking system ascended from 5 billion lei in 2020 to over 8 billion in 2021, 10 billion lei in 2022, almost 14 billion lei in 2023 and 14.2 billion lei in 2024, according to BNR data. In contrast, the economy had a decrease of 3.7% in 2020, then marked an advance of about 6% in 2021, so that in the following years the GDP advance would brake at 4% in 2022, at 2.4% in 2023 and to 0.8% in 2024, according to data from the Institute of Statistics.
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