Romania’s economy is functional and on the rise; next year we will start spending the money from the EU, especially for infrastructure investments, so that we will not have to deal with the depreciation of the economic growth. It is not us saying it now, President Basescu did it last autumn. It was October 21, a little while after the speculations on the forex market that had caused the RON to depreciate suddenly and one month before the parliamentary elections. Coincidentally, on the same day, Premier Tariceanu stated that Romania would post a 4 to 6% economic growth in 2009.

Back then, as well as now, the way businesspeople and authorities treat the economic information, the events happening before their eyes – in the US, in Europe and here at home, is the first step in the battle against the crisis. Those who look for the information and take advantage of it always stand to gain; those who ignore it either cannot shield themselves from the crisis, or (in the case of the government) only manage to prolong the dangerous illusion that the crisis will eventually pass on its own – unless it has already done so.

”Honestly, I didn’t imagine the situation in America would have such powerful effects in Europe, too, and especially in Romania,” admits Florentin Banu, the man who developed the Joe wafers brand and the Artima supermarkets. ”As proof that I did not anticipate it, I am now reeling from the heavy blow in terms of not only my real estate investments, but also of the plastic business.” Banu controls Banuconstruct, which develops apartment blocks in Timisoara and the plastic and mould factory Interpart Production.

”Unfortunately for me, I did not anticipate the crisis. When trouble started on the American real estate market I thought there might be repercussions on the Romanian real estate market, too, but nothing more,” Cosmin Alexandru, founder of branding consultancy Brandivia and cofounder of Erudio, in his turn admits.

Another man who paid attention to the real estate market was Marius Stancescu, chairman of business services firm Riff Holding, to whom, however, the obvious price bubble fuelled by the boom of cheap loans reminded of the Japanese crisis in the eighties, so that he started to ”stubbornly” look for information on similar situations in other parts of the world – South America, South-East Asia, where the overheating of the economies in the nineties caused the well-known crises of the time. ”I found lots of similar events to what was happening in the US and obviously to what was going to happen on the old continent,” he says, confessing he had tried to warn as may Romanian entrepreneurs as he could about what was going to happen, but to no avail, precisely because things looked so good in our country, that the possibility of a crisis seemed out of the question.

Among those who anticipated the crisis would be imported in Romania, as well, was Marius Sfintescu, manager of private equity fund 3TS Capital. ”I anticipated we would see the expansion of the US crisis to the entire world, including Romania. I used the specialised media as a source of information.” Which is why Sfintescu was one of the few business people who agreed to answer BUSINESS Magazin’s question about what his opinion on the policy of the foreign governments in dealing with the crisis; whether he felt that the relaxation of the monetary policy was too slow in Germany or France, considering the deflationary climate and whether it was important from now on for the developed states to concern themselves with the reduction of the monetary mass in good time in order to avoid a stagflation friendly environment in 2011.

TRADUCERE DE LOREDANA FRATILA-CRISTESCU SI DANIELA STOICAN