Could be the International Financial Crisis a Sinonim to a Profound Recession of Romanian Economy? A Theory of “Weak” Statistical Signals

This paper consists of a graphical illustration of the Romanian economic cycle during the period 1990-2007, as a background of contemporary financial crisis. The first part provides an overview of the definition of recession and financial crisis, and the gains from using both types in financial and economic thinking to understand the Romanian contemporary economy. The second part formulates a hypothesis of economic and national GDP cyclical phenomenon of “Juglar” type, with two visible evolution periods, the former of expansion and the latter of recession, and between them, less evident, the crisis and the downward. The Romanian market economy crossed two “Juglar” cycles over five electoral periods that succeeded already to outline the elements of electoral cyclical type. Pursuing the evolution of the indexes studied during 1990-2007, one can establish that the intensity of the economic GDP cyclical phenomenon from the first period (1990-1997) is accompanied by the trends of equilibrium in the second part (1997-2007), trends that can be evaluated as positive ones in the macroeconomic stability point of view. But, banking crises are preceded by credit booms. The third part of this paper is devoted to a special analysis of Caprio, Klingebiel, Laeven, and Noguera (2005) banking crisis database. The most important conclusions underlines that a new recession was imminent in Romanian economy in the years 2008 or 2009. The influence of the financial crisis will emphasize the dimension of economic crisis and recession, in general, for Romanian market economy.