Negriţoiu: Romania of today is the failure of the political generation of the '90s

Former minister and presidential advisor in the early '90s and banker for 14 years, Negriţoiu says his generation is to blame for Romania's recurring slippages.

Romania's current economic situation marks the failure of the political generation of the '90s, which is still in power, with President Traian Băsescu and central bank governor Mugur Isărescu as representatives, says Mişu Negriţoiu, CEO of ING Bank, former reform minister in the early '90s and then advisor to President Ion Iliescu.

"We are back where we started from: from the way basic policies are approached to the quality of the act of governance, we are back to the early '90s, when at least we had the excuse of not knowing very much. Now we have more vulnerabilities than before joining the European Union, because it was apparent that with us, slippages can recur: we rectify a situation and then the problem comes back. 15-20 years ago we did not know what to do, then we knew, but went about it the wrong way. So, we ended up being the only EU country to continue to work with the World Bank on basic economic restructuring programmes. This is the failure brought about by the political generation of the '90s, which I was part of, whose representatives are President Băsescu and Governor Isărescu."

Negriţoiu turns 61 in spring, and was 39 at the time of the 1989 Revolution. Isărescu will be 62 in August, and Băsescu will turn 60 in November, all three of whom are representatives of a generation of around 40 year-olds at the time of the Revolution and who took over leading positions in the state structures. Negriţoiu was head of the Foreign Investment Agency, reform minister and later presidential advisor and deputy until 1997, when he moved to the banking sector, taking over a top management position at ING Bank. For nearly five years he has been CEO of ING Bank Romania and says he has no intention of returning to a job with the state administration.

On another note, ING Bank Romania's boss says the National Bank of Romania did not use any of the levers a central bank normally uses to drive an economy out of crisis - the flexibility of the exchange rate, which is merely theoretical, the rate cut or the cash injection.

"NBR did not use any levers and now we are wondering why the prolonged crisis. Because what should have been done was not done in due time, because the agreement with the IMF actually worked only one year out of two, in 2010, and today's situation is the result of the tolerance for postponement of economic growth steps. The reboot was delayed for one year, as well," the banker told ZF.