WITH THE COMING ELECTIONS Mugur Isărescu warns: beware of politicians promising the world

NBR governor, Mugur Isărescu warns the population that it should be wary of the promises that politicians may begin to make in the coming period, as the elections are drawing near.

"It is not enough to have good intentions and to be a good speaker on TV, the trap of populism is looming and it is predominant in today"s speeches and it could lead us down the road to hell. This risk is getting greater because the elections are getting near and the temptation of promising more than the economy can bear is great", Isărescu said, who added that Romania is the only country in the European Union where the number of voting pensioners exceeds the number of voting taxpayers, which leads political parties to make promises they can"t keep.

The governor of the Central Bank said that, in the end, the role of the political factors is to strike a balance between what people want and what can be done, and to balance the fiscal burden across generations.

Isărescu continued his criticism on public speeches, showing that the sides debating the public budget deficit are acting as if "somebody would throw money from the sky", and the issue is treated with an "extraordinary" nonchalance.

"The problem of the public debt is not even passed on to the next generation, but rather it is shifted to someone else. It looks like a burden that is not the result of our decisions", the official of the central bank said, who once again stressed that we are not out of the recession.

"Exiting the crisis is a matter of fiscal and financial costs, and of avoiding making further mistakes. If we want to exit the crisis by doing the same things that we did before, then that means we haven"t done anything", Isărescu said.

After the first eight months of the year, the budget deficit has reached 20.9 billion lei, the equivalent of 4.09% of the GDP, after increasing by almost 1 billion lei in August.