Isărescu: We cannot pay salaries from NBR's reserve

The NBR (National Bank of Romania) could not spend its reserve to pay wages and pensions, as some have suggested, because it is essential towards ensuring exchange rate stability, governor Mugur Isărescu said yesterday.

"One does not understand that the reserve is meant to ensure exchange rate stability. It appears to be a given, similarly to health. You start to realise how important it is when you don't have it any more, when a disease takes hold. More often than not, it's too late when that happens," said Isărescu at the end of a seminar organised at the NBR, centred on a study on boosting institutional ability to manage the business world, conducted by the Romanian Centre for Economic Policies, the Group for Applied Economics, and Deloitte consultancy.

The NBR's foreign reserve amounts to almost 32 billion euros, 4.6 billion euros higher than in October 2008, when the financial crisis first emerged on the Romanian market.