”After a long time of significant growth, businesspeople are still feeling the urge to go directly to a bank when they want to develop or when they need money to fix a problem,” says Lucian Cojocaru, head of the network commercial department of BRD-Groupe Societe Generale. Bankers fought tooth and nail for years on end when the economy was growing at a fast pace and businesses were running almost unattended in any industry, to finance companies and individuals, in a fiercer and fiercer competition.

Things radically changed last October, when it became clear to everybody that the Romanian economy would not be able to avoid the effects of the financial, and especially of the economic crisis, that has been shaking the entire world. ”Banks were the first to feel the effects of the crisis,” Cojocaru says, considering most of them are part of international financial groups that were affected on their home markets and their problems spread to the branches in Romania like a domino effect. When problems started in the Romanian economy last autumn, bankers abruptly revised their lending policies, moving from a very lax to a very strict attitude, BRDís manager explains. ”Companies, on the other hand, were hit in the second wave,” having grown out of inertia for a while and started to feel the problems more acutely towards the end of the year, when payments from the state budget were frozen, commercial and financial flows slowed down, consumer spending plummeted and entire industries collapsed.

”Businesspeople did what they knew how to do best from the past then: they came to the bank to compensate,” says Lucian Cojocaru - an entirely natural habit after so many years of fast-paced lending growth. At the bank, however, they found something they had not been accustomed with: bankers no longer wanted them as clients; on the contrary, they were reluctant to give them any more money (...), Cojocaru says. After the abrupt slowdown in the last few months of last year, the annualised growth pace of non-governmental lending went down from to 25% from 55% in January 2008.

How the shift from the general exuberance to this almost completely frozen financing market occurred is quite obvious for everybody now, especially when looking back at the succession of events. The reasons that continue to keep the market locked, six months from the onset of the crisis, are less clear, though. As a paradox, the confusion is not generated by the lack of logical explanations, but on the contrary, by their sheer number, diversity and development from one day to another.

Towards the end of last year, bankers seemed unanimously convinced that the Romanian banking system was faced with a general shortage of cash, as a result of the increase in the price of money on international markets. Fears that the parent banks would limit or even completely withdraw lines of credit they had used to keep their branches in Romania going (loans that total 10 billion euros, according to the NBR data), turned out to be unfounded, too, given that it was proven that over 90% of them would be renewed, according to NBR governor Mugur Isarescu.

At the end of the day, the ”disease” cannot be treated in any other way than by starting from the causes, because, as already proven by other Western economies, throwing money at the economy does not do too much good eventually.