Romanians save more money in banks

The population’s savings in the banking system have increased over the past three months slowly, but steadily. ROL-denominated public securities are still the people’s favourite saving tools.

The higher interests provided by the Finance Ministry for T-bills, the zero risk of such securities, as well as the high liquidity which made the banks maintain the interests for deposits at the same level for several months now, were the main reasons for the population to focus on public securities.

Whereas the interest for a regular one- to three-month deposit ranges somewhere around 35-37%, the T-bills offered a 42-43% yield.

According to the latest official data released by NBR, the population’s savings in February went up 2.4% to 46,923bn lei, registering a lower dynamic than the one of the ROL-denominated T-bills, which rose 9.9%, to 10,770bn lei.

The domestic currency denominated T-bills held by the non-banking sector at the end of February amounted to 18,990bn lei, up 8.8% since January. The foreign currency securities held by the non-banking sector in late February reached the equivalent of $106.4 million, down 23% since the previous month.

The money supply at the end of February amounted to 186,210bn lei, up 3.4% as compared to the previous month. The 1.1% increase in real terms was caused by the increase in both of its components.

The foreign net assets rose 3.5% to 100,430bn lei, while the internal net assets went up 3.3% to 85,750bn lei. The increase in external net assets was due to the 4.6% rise in the “convertible currencies” component, following net hard currencies purchases operated by the central bank from the forex market.