The sharp adjustment of the ratio reflects the deleveraging of the major European banking groups operating in Romania. The central bank is carefully monitoring the process but says it is pleased to see it unfold “in orderly fashion” without sudden massive withdrawals of cash.
The central bank is even encouraging local banks to pay some of their debt to their parent banks after having freed up about EUR500 million from the mandatory minimum reserves.
Official data show the exposure of the nine banks that signed the Vienna Initiative in 2009 (Erste, Raiffeisen, Eurobank, National Bank of Greece, UniCredit, Societe Generale, Alpha Bank, Volksbank and Piraeus) to have gone down by almost 18% by November 2013 compared with the March 2009 reference.
Loan volume is almost 13% higher than in November 2008, while deposits increased by 47%. Loans dropped by about 6% in real terms in the past year, while local deposits went up 5%. In the Czech Republic for instance, the loan/deposit ratio is below 1.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)