Themonthly bank bill - the factor that distinguishes this crisis fromthe one shaking the economy a decade ago and is now giving theworst headaches to Romanians, comes to cover the exuberant consumerspending of the past years, which left consumers with a 24billion-euro debt.
More than half of this debt is visible to the naked eye: 15billion euros were spent on the 1 million new cars bought from 2005through 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 millionin form of overdrafts, totalling 5 billion RON (a little over onebillion euros) together.
Simple mortgage loans are found in 190,000 accounts, totalling 26billion RON (6 billion euros).
Romanians are paying 2.5 billion euros in interests on the loansthey took from banks every year. Adding the instalments on theprincipal, the total spending with bank repayments amount to 5billion euros a year.
"The current crisis has proven the unsustainable nature of theeconomic model based on aggressive non-governmental lending growth.Thus the crisis ended a time marked by profit rush and by taking onmore and more risks," believes Nicolae Dardac, professor with theCurrency department of the Academy of Economic Studies ofBucharest.
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