The National Bank of Romanian (NBR) Interest Is to Be Lowered

The Finance Minister, Mihai Tanasescu, said that the inflation rate in the first semester of the year has been much less then they expected. This could allow NBR to lower the interests. "The inflation rate will be with 2% less than our estimations. This allows the central bank to lower the interests in the near future", said Mihai Tanasescu, according to Mediafax.

According to the National Institute of Statistics (NIS) the capacity prices increased with 3.7% in the first semester, under the Governments estimations of 5.7%. NIS showed that the inflation got to 0.6% in June and 0.3% in May. The annual rate of the inflation has been 12% in June, with 0.35 less than in the previous month. The analysts expect that the NBR will decrease the present interest of 20.75% next week. NBR has lowered interests by 0.5% in June. Due to the new agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Romania should decrease the inflation rate to 9% in 2004. (Daniela Ivan)