Mugur Isarescu: when defending the national currency, the best approach is neither aggressive nor barbarian

Romania’s National Central Bank governor Mugur Isarescu declared on Wednesday that when the central bank defends the national currency, the operations cannot called aggressive nor barbarian referring to the speculative attack against the national currency in 2008. The governor said that in times like that the central bank attempts to avoid market panic.

His most important statements at the presentation of the report written by Lucian Croitoru, counselor of the governor on the liquidity, the speculative attack on October 2008 and the reputation of the central bank:

• The report presents an interesting debate and the theme triggered two years ago important discussions. 
• It has a scientific, academic approach with very few media aspects I consider that the paper catches clearly the events at the time and I believe it has a historic quality 
• As a person involved in the events, I need to make some clarifications  
• The interventions of the central bank were called at the time aggressive and recently they were described as barbarian 
• When you defend something, the defensive operation can be anything but barbarian
• The attacker can be barbarian. There are 40 banks on the market and each has around 15 dealers, the Central Bank has 4-5 and therefore I cannot see how they can be aggressive with hundreds of dealers in the same time. 
• Interventions are made through one, maximum two banks We tried to avoid panic then and I believe we managed