Foreigners collect 10 times higher sums from deposits

Foreign investors collected 863 million euros from interest rates on term deposits set up with Romanian banks, almost ten times as much as in the same period of 2007, according to data from the NBR (National Bank of Romania). The increase in sums collected from local banks is correlated with the significant increase in the volume of deposits set up, but has been strongly fuelled by the increasingly high interest rates paid in RON by local banks, especially since this spring, when the NBR interest rate approached 10% a year. “This is funding attracted by local banks from abroad via derivatives. The significant increase in the volume of these deposits recorded since spring overlaps with the increased difficulty in securing funding from the local market,” says Nicolae Alexandru-Chidesciuc, senior economist of ING Bank. In April alone, the volume went up by a billion euros, to 4.5 billion euros, after an almost 6 billion-euro all-time high in June.