After a month of hard winter, like we've never had in the last 50 years, spring shows its first signs. But not for Romania's economy.

The president's silence over the last few weeks showed us that things aren't looking so good when it comes to the fight against the crisis. No, I am not talking about the silence when it comes to the protests in the University Square and in the rest of the country, we are talking about the way he chose to ignore communicating the macroeconomic forecasts prior to the publication of the results by the National Statistics Institute.

Preliminary data on the evolution of the economy in Q4 2011 shows that Romania is far from being in "excellent shape", like Jeffrey Franks said in a recent interview for "BURSA". The authorities' moderate triumphalism, on the success of the austerity program, has proved its uselessness ever since mid-2011.

In an article published in June 2011 (author's note: "How can we exit the recession if we didn't even exit it?", BURSA, June 27th, 2011), we showed that the exit from the recession is an illusion, considering that the increase in stocks heavily distorts the economic growth indicators.

At the time I also made an "optimistic" forecast: "If the current trends persist, in the optimistic case, this would lead to seeing a first negative quarter in Q4 2011 and the confirmation of the recession after Q1 2012". The preliminary data from the National Statistics Institute have confirmed this forecast, and the publication of the first sectoral estimates, on March 6th 2012, will show us how well the economy is really doing.

For now, data for December 2011 shows that the industry has seen a month to month slump of 16.9%, according to seasonally unadjusted data, and a quarterly drop of 16%, after advancing 5.1% in Q3 2011.

The quarterly drop of the GDP of 0.2% almost certainly conceals