Heaviest burden: consumers have 24bn euros to repay to banks

The monthly bank bill - the factor that distinguishes this crisis from the one shaking the economy a decade ago and is now giving the worst headaches to Romanians, comes to cover the exuberant consumer spending of the past years, which left consumers with a 24 billion-euro debt.

More than half of this debt is visible to the naked eye: 15 billion euros were spent on the 1 million new cars bought from 2005 through 2010, most of them paid for with loans.
Out of the total ongoing loans, four million are consumer loans, worth 71 billion RON (16.8 billion euros). In addition to that, almost two million are in form of credit card lines and 1.2 million in form of overdrafts, totalling 5 billion RON (a little over one billion euros) together.
Simple mortgage loans are found in 190,000 accounts, totalling 26 billion RON (6 billion euros).
Romanians are paying 2.5 billion euros in interests on the loans they took from banks every year. Adding the instalments on the principal, the total spending with bank repayments amount to 5 billion euros a year.
"The current crisis has proven the unsustainable nature of the economic model based on aggressive non-governmental lending growth. Thus the crisis ended a time marked by profit rush and by taking on more and more risks," believes Nicolae Dardac, professor with the Currency department of the Academy of Economic Studies of Bucharest.