Senior bank official: Global uncertainty is the most important systemic risk that we deem severe

The most important systemic risk to financial stability that the National Bank of Romania (BNR) deems severe is the unprecedented uncertainty at global level, which occurs amidst multiple geopolitical events, said on Thursday Matei Kubinschi, BNR's deputy director for financial stability."The main risks to financial stability remained high, similar to previous reports and assessments by other European institutions specialising in this area. The most important systemic risk that we deem severe is uncertainty at the global level, an unprecedented uncertainty that occurs amidst multiple geopolitical events, such as war, political reconfigurations at the global level, the tendency to move from globalisation to an internal orientation and more recently the trade tariffs announced by the American Administration. All these events, of course, have a direct economic impact and we will see what this impact is, but until then I would just like to emphasise the fact that uncertainty produces effects by itself, because it affects the behaviour of investors, consumers, companies, it can produce volatility in the financial markets, it can postpone or cause the abandonment of some investments by companies and it can even change people's behaviour, to determine them to save preventively or any other changes in consumption behaviour," Kubinschi told the Finmedia "Financial Year 2025" conference.He said that domestically there is a "problem of twin deficits" and the worsening trend witnessed in 2024 can only contribute to the prolongation of the fiscal consolidation process."I would like to insist on the implementation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. In the beginning, Romania was among the leading states, let's say, in the implementation of the project, both in terms of payment requests and the amounts attracted. Now, if we look, the programme is significantly delayed. Romania remained among the lagging states in the EU. As far as the achievement of the targets and milestones is concerned, we are somewhere at 14%, while the EU average is nearing 29%, and in terms of the amounts attracted we are somewhere below 30%, when there are many states that have already exceeded 60-65%, such as France and Germany. These delays are likely to affect the possibility of attracting the remaining amounts, which are very important, there are still about EUR 19 billion that we can attract, of course, very important given that this year the financing needs of the Romanian state are considerable. I believe that it is essential to accelerate the pace of implementation of milestones and targets, but certainly also of projects and to prioritise the projects that stand the greatest chance of success to be implemented until mid-2026," said Kubinschi.