* Last year, the Central Bank has substantially increased its short term investments, cutting down on its long term ones
The latest annual report of the National Bank of Romania (NBR) suggests that it is exercising caution when it comes to the solutions which have been proposed for dealing with the current economic crisis. Moreover, the governor of the Central Bank, Mugur Isărescu, stated last week, that the world is at the end of a 40-year cycle, which it is hard to know what it will be followed by. He said: "I can't get away from my personal experiences. I think that we are all of us prisoners of the life that we have lived and that we still have on this Earth and we react accordingly. I entered my adult life, which was a relatively public one, in 1971, as the post-war system of Bretton Woods, which also lasted about 40 years, based on a price of gold of about 35 dollars an ounce. And I have seen how everything that was considered true before "71 and what I had read was no longer true in economic thought, the exchange rates were not supposed to be fixed, they weren't good anymore, gold was no longer supposed to be used as a currency".
Sometime in the 80s, I noticed that we were entering a new cycle - market freedom, monetarism, new keynesianism, and in 2007 I saw turmoil and reconsidering, this crisis began. I think that at the end of a 40-year cycle, I don't really know what follows".
In this context, last year the NBR opted to reduce its long term placements and to increase the short term ones. Thus the amounts of sight deposits of the Central Bank increased almost four times, in 2012, to 30.763 billion lei. At the same time, the value of the term deposits dropped by almost half, during the reviewed period, to 7.935 billion lei, at the end of last year, while securities denominated in foreign currencies fell, in turn by almost 20 billion lei, to
