As payments ceased at the National Investments Fund, suddenly, coincidentally or not, another crisis shaped up. According to Prime Minister Isarescu’s advisors, numerous deponents with the Romanian Commercial Bank received telephone calls urging them to withdraw their money because it was in danger at the bank.
Unfortunately, this very information, which the BCR deponents in Sibiu read in a newspaper article, may have been responsible for the panic. Several questions then arise. First, how did the “rumour makers” know the deponents’ numbers? Any supposition is just as grave: from the people inside the BCR, or from people in institutions that have access to such information.
Second, the normal reaction to an anonymous call is to reject what you hear and, at best, to use it to tackle your own problem. When you want to rescue your money, you will withdraw it first and not lets others know. So the situation could have been tackled immediately, by identifying the people who were called and explaining to them that they were being manipulated. Did the whole country need to know about these manipulations – because obviously this is what they were? Apology is admission of guilt, and only a shadow of doubt, given people’s extreme anxiousness lately, was enough to create panic.
Which cannot be blamed on the deponents. Who doesn’t want his money back? The snowball of mistrust has not appeared, over time, only in Romania. There are some analysts who say Romania has been struck by stock market crises without having a stock market. The panic of selling at dwindling prices, which occasionally rocks capital markets, can be seen, as a psychological phenomenon, in the fear manifest in Romanian deponents with some mutual fund or bank who rush to withdraw their money on news of instability.
And panic is so much greater when mistrust is greater. One by one in the last ten years, banks and funds have collapsed that have been vouched for not only by their bosses, but by the very officials charged with overseeing them. Credit Bank was allegedly safe, but it crumbled. Dacia Felix was safe, too. So were Bankcoop, BIR, and Albina, safe. But they collapsed. In fact, mistrust is possible because there is no one to blame. If the guilty are not found and punished, any social system, not necessarily a stock market system, will not hold.
People need to know that someone got punished. That someone assumed the responsibilities. The fog that surrounds Romania’s proven crooks, the endless trials of those investigated in various obscure dealings are bad credit to the Romanian state. Words won’t help. Much less the words that kick responsibility around from one institution to the other, on legal grounds, but which for the average man have no significance. He knows that those who handle money are not on their own, and much less that the CNVM oversees the capital market, while the NBR oversees the currency market, and that the two institutions only report to Parliament.
If no one is found guilty again, and the FNI affair is buried like all the other, it is hard to say what credibility today’s rulers of Romania will be left with.