Central bank's official: 7 million Romanians waiting to invest billions of Euro in state listings

The argument "we are not selling this country for peanuts" will not hold, because we can actually buy it ourselves, there are 7 million Romanians who are waiting to invest billions of Euro in these state listings and here I am referring to the private pension funds, said, on Tuesday, in a specialty video-conference, Cristian Popa, Board member of the National Bank of Romania (BNR). "The stock market is the barometer of the economy. The fact that stock indexes are close to being at maximum, I believe it shows that the economy works and that it is on a recovery trajectory. I believe we are in the year of return to normality, not just economically, but from other perspectives as well. The stock indexes level contains both current conditions, as well as expectation, in this case optimistic, of investors regarding the post-pandemic economic comeback, but with other influences as well, such as monetary policies. The stock market barometer measures only those sectors which are listed on the stock market. In this context, the argument "we are not selling this country for peanuts", which was circulated in the public space, will not hold, because we can purchase it ourselves, because we have a developed industry of pension funds, an industry developed by mutual funds and a growing investment sector (...) There are 7 million Romanians who are waiting to invest billions of Euro in these state listings and here I am referring to the private pension funds. Seven million Romanians have billions available for investments. We can sell them shares or not (...)," Popa mentioned. "A second reason would be that the stock market is at its maximum. I believe that this is the moment the state should list its companies on the stock market (...) I believe that the state should learn from the private sector, and the private sector clearly has a tendency to get near the capital market (...) There is local capital that is waiting to buy shares in the state companies and I am not referring to a particular part of the society. Every single Romanian has access to the stock market through the private pension funds and the mutual funds to the listed companies," Cristian Popa said. Representatives of BNR, the Ministry of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Tourism (MEAT), the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB), and the Romanian Pension Funds' Association (APAPR), participate, on Tuesday, in the "Capital Market - The Stock Market in the year of sanitary crisis and economic uncertainty" video-conference, organized by Profit.ro.AGERPRES(RO - author: Daniel Badea, editor: Andreea Marinescu; EN - author: Catalin Cristian Trandafir, editor: Maria Voican)