I have read two papers prepared by Aspen Institute and the German Marshall Fund: the report “Dialogues on the national interest. Recommendations of public policies” and the program “East-West Gateway”. They generate the object of the forthcoming debates. Allow me to make some remarks regarding the national interest and the transformations within the financial sector that are currently taking place in Europe. The national interest goes beyond its economic dimension, although it is also true that the smooth functioning of the economy is not only an objective per se, but also a means to achieve the other objectives subordinated to the national interest. As any other European central bank we are focused on price and financial stability. Obviously, monetary and financial stability is an essential ingredient of economic performance. This is all the more relevant for a catching-up economy, such as Romania. On the one hand, progress towards convergence is impossible to imagine without capital accumulation from local and external sources alike, and it cannot be achieved in the absence of a viable financial system. On the other hand, investments imply a long-term outlook, whereas high and volatile inflation or fragile financial sector hampers long-term planning. Moreover, the recent global crisis has shown that it is far cheaper to prevent financial instability than to rescue financial institutions in distress.
Financial crises are even costlier in emerging economies than in industrialized countries, as their ability to bear such costs is severely constrained by spillovers between the banking system and sovereigns and the related vicious circle of escalating risk premia. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  The crisis has also revealed that effective policy remedies have a transnational perspective. In the European Union the idea of a Banking Union emerged as a solution to break the above-mentioned vicious circle, thus putting a stop to financial fragmentation and helping restore the normal capital flow from the core EU countries to the periphery. In addition, the Banking Union has the merit of removing the contradiction between the pan-European nature of banking activity and keeping banking supervisory and resolution tasks at the national level. In this context, Romania’s membership in the Banking Union comes as a natural choice, given that euro area banks hold three fourths of the total assets of the Romanian banking system and two thirds of its capital. As was the case with EU membership, the national interest may be better served in the banking sector by relinquishing some of the national policy prerogatives. In the context of such a high financial integration, preserving the banking supervisory powers at national level would only entail suboptimal results, due to the limited access to information on parent banks and the lack of a cross-border perspective.