UPDATE Romanian authorities debate on possible solutions to diminish the effects of the crisis

Romanian National Central Bank governor, Mugur Isarescu, Finance minister Gheorghe Pogea and others debate on Thursday the possible solutions needed to diminish the effects of the crisis, Romanian news agency Mediafax informs.

Here are the most important declarations from the conference

Mugur Isarescu:

• Any crisis comes with a stress test and we need to figure out how to solve it and how fast to react

• The essential aspect is to re-establish trust: we need to construct credible program

• In the past we had trouble with credibility and we were forced to import from abroad

• In the current context, we need to look at the bright side: it’s been eight months since the collapse of the American Lehman Brothers company, and we have a lot of time to draw the line and analyze how we have responded so far

• We need to believe that we have programs and we need to offer a vision to the business environment

• It is not easy to choose a new government on the verge of the crisis and be reactive to the economic environment

• We’ve been through a period of uncertainty: we need to truly understand what happened before and after elections

• We managed to decrease interest rates and maintain the exchange rate even if we had negative reports

• The monetary policy is back to normal

• This process will continue

• Most of the times, the news reflect certain interests

• In my 20 years of career, this agreement with the IMF was the fastest to be settled: it is a boring agreement and nobody reads it because it does not contain anything surprising

• The ease of the authorities to take up a loan should make us wonder

• Some analysts declared that the deficit is caused by an overheating, an excess in consumption and we are still talking about increasing salaries by 50%: rating agencies were right in this respect

• The generosity of the foreign capital is getting worse, there still are negative reports

• Public investments are beneficial in this period

• We will not need to stimulate consumption – it will start growing by itself

• Both states and banks need to coordinate their plans to strike a balance

Vice President of the Insurance Supervising Committee, Tudor Balta

• there are 200,000 people working on the insurance market

• The Committee declared that it will undertake some stress tests on the market

• The Committee emphasizes its supervising role at the moment