The main quality of statistics: drunkenness

Poor Vergil Voineagu was dismissed on Friday by Victor Ponta from the management of the National Statistics Institute (INS), being accused of having made a huge mistake which caused the GDP for the year 2011 to be 21 billion lei than it actually was, but it was mere happenstance that the decision to dismiss him was made by Ponta, because in November 2011, Emil Boc had also threatened to fire Voinea. At the time of the census, Emil Boc had said that the head of the INS had shown "the supreme form of incompetence".

At 19:00, on Friday, it was found that there was no calculation mistake, rather, the difference of 21 billion lei comes from the updating of the data, according to the European methodology he uses, but poor Voineagu failed to convince anybody and the top position of the INS was temporarily offered to Mrs. Beatrix Gered, the vice-president of the INS, who has the support of the UDMR. Beatrice Gered is notorious for having fainted in July 2010 on the stairs of the Government building occupied by the Cabinet of Emil Boc, and for being the vice-president who was dismissed and reinstated in July 2012 by Victor Ponta, when the prime minister was scrambling to diminish the number of citizens who had the right to vote in the Referendum to dismiss Băsescu.

When I say "poor" Voineagu, I don't mean that he has been wronged in any way - I've always been convinced that the National Statistics Institute is a political instrument, which massages numbers, which will shred papers whenever asked to do so by the government (which it answers to), whether it changes the structure of the consumer basket for the Năstase cabinet, to make it less obvious that inflation has boomed, whether it's raising the GDP for Emil Boc, so he can get a better sovereign rating, in turn allowing him to borrow on the foreign markets and fire fewer civil sector workers, thus avoiding being thrown out through mass riots.

If it wasn't for the independent statistics of the National Bank of Romania and for the European oversight, we would be completely lost, without a hope of getting around the chain of lies.

The only reason I am actually saying "poor" Voineagu is for the thankless position he held: according to the Law of Statistics, he was paid out of the Budget of the Secretariat of the Government to draw up "independent professional reports" - who the hell is going to believe that?!

It's just as if, at the FNI, the management company calculated its own net assets - posting weekly increases of 2%, relentlessly, for two years, it became the biggest mutual fund in the country, it earned its management fees as expected, and then it was found out, upon its bankruptcy, that it had no custodian bank and that it was calculating the NAV itself.

The Romanian Government, through the Ministry of Finance, issues bonds (they're also securities, which are somewhat similar to the shares of a mutual fund, except they offer a fixed return), which it sells domestically, as well as abroad, and their market price is affected by the increase of our GDP, by inflation, by the exchange rate of our currency, by the size of the deficit, by the social and political stability - which are all of them announced as data, or deriving from those, by the National Statistics Institute, which is subordinated to the Government.

It is a very, very good business!

Wouldn't we all like it if we were the government, so we can give suckers papers in exchange for money, so we can continue to rule the domestic suckers.

And we'll just skim off the top, you know how it goes.

Thus, working such a thankless job, Voineagu had no other way to relieve the stress than downing a brandy every now and again, which is what he showed on his phone intervention at Realitatea TV, of November 2011 (search with Google).

He probably felt the need to numb his conscience.

That is an asset - it means that deep down he has some traces of conscience.

Have you ever seen Emil Boc drunk?

No.

How about Victor Ponta?

No.

Why is that?

Aren't they involved in the massaging of the statistical data?

In fact, aren't they the only ones who order it?

Why is it that Voineagu is the only one to get drunk?