What's with all these currency inflows on the Romanian market?

Massive currency inflows are finding their way to Romania and it’s not just the foreign direct investment.
The persistent surplus recorded on the forex market has forced the National Bank (NBR) to buy almost 1.7 billion dollars since the beginning of the year.
The bank thus managed to prevent a significant nominal appreciation of the ROL, since no depreciation was posted until several weeks ago. Because of the market excess, the domestic currency depreciation is costing the NBR more and more each day.
Where is the foreign currency coming from and how fast can the inflows be reversed? The current transfers inflows alone, mainly money sent by the Romanians working abroad, amounted to almost one billion dollars between January-August and are likely to reach 1.5 billion dollars by the end of the year.
“The economy is too slow in absorbing these currency inflows,” says the NBR chief-economist Valentin Lazea.
According to analysts, the exchange offices are responsible for a big chunk of the currency excess. This surplus can be seen by the National Bank but is not logged in the daily market reports.
In the summer months, for instance, the Romanian Commercial Bank (BCR) announced daily net purchases of about 5 million dollars through the exchange offices. If we add BRD-SocGen and Raiffeisen, which also have complex networks, the total amounts may have very well stood at 5-10 million dollars daily, accounting for $100-200 million in monthly excess (in 20 working days). Some of the money bought by banks from the natural persons comes from international transfers made using the Western Union payment system, which brought almost 600 million dollars to Romania this year.
Another question arises: how much of the total currency inflows can be deemed as short-term speculative capital, which could disturb the balance in case of massive withdrawals?
“Less than one third of the capital account could be perceived as speculative capital and this is the worst scenario,” Valentin Lazea says.
In the first eight months of the year, the current account posted a positive balance of 806 million dollars.
According to Lazea, it is little likely that Romania has attracted speculative inflows on the domestic currency, since the decrease of ROL rates has outpaced inflation, thus making ROL deposits less attractive.
The big currency surplus on the interbanking market is also due to the fact that currency lending has become cheaper than ROL credits. “Most of the currency loans were probably sold on the market for ROL, because it was only logical to borrow in foreign currency and place it in ROL,” a dealer says.