The "subprime" notion entered the domestic financial vocabulary after the effects of the financial crisis could no longer be ignored by our authorities. According to the definition from Investopedia, subprime represents a classification of the debtors which are considered highly uncertain when it come to their ability to repay their loans.
In the international press news initially appeared about the subprime loans in the United States and about the financial derivatives built using them as underlying assets.
The Romanian authorities, especially the National Bank of Romania, sought to reassure us, at the time: the crisis would not affect Romania, because exotic financial products did not exist in our banking system. In 2009, governor Mugur Isărescu was saying that "a significant part of the current economic crisis has a virtual nature" due to a "significant media component".
Thus, the monetary authority of the state took the first step towards a subprime institution, by disregarding the signals coming from the international markets.
The ratio of non-performing loans was 7.9% in 2009, but it increased all the way to 20.3% in June 2013, and the rate of the credit risk rose from 15.3% to 30.5% over the course of the same period. How was it possible? Simple, because the NBR adopted some inexplicable measures, such as the increase of the allowed degree of indebtedness of the population, just as the real estate bubble was reaching its peak.
The NBR probably hoped that the engines of lending would continue to work, at least until things returned to normal in the West. But normalcy is still taking its time after six years, and the burden of loans, out of proportion to the ability to repay them, has become increasingly heavy, for companies as well as the population.
In all these years, under the wise oversight of the NBR, the banking system
