Banco de Portugal Governor Mário Centeno this Wednesday criticized what he says is the practice of rewriting history with censored data, at a time when his predecessor’s statements in the regulator have sparked controversy.
Mário Centeno spoke at the “Banca do Futuro” conference in Lisbon, organized by Jornal de Negócios, when he praised the evolution of the financial system in recent years.
Without naming names, the governor of Banco de Portugal (BdP) said: “There is only one dimension in which we maintain the old habit: the habit of rewriting history with censored data and I tell you in fact that we seem to find that’s very nice”.
The former finance minister is one of the targets of the book “O Governador”, edited by Dom Quixote, which is the result of a series of interviews by the journalist of Observador Luís Rosa to Carlos Costa, who between 2010 and 2010 the Bank of Portugal led. 2020, and has sparked controversy.
During his speech, Mário Centeno emphasized that the Portuguese banking system is very different now than it was a few years ago.
“The evolution of the Portuguese banking sector in recent years has been characterized by a strengthening of capital position, liquidity levels, improvement in credit quality and an increase in profitability,” he said.
According to Centeno, “the steps taken in recent years were decisive for a successful future”.
“At the end of 2015, ¾ of Portuguese banking assets and deposits were in institutions with a compromised future,” he illustrated.
The governing body of the BdP defended that there is no modern society that can grow in this environment.
“This is not a job of the Central Bank or the government. It is and was a collective job, taking the country out of the bin, the excessive deficit procedures and the uncertainty of what the rating of a single Canadian rating agency would be.” “, he said. .
For Centeno, this process “accelerated the clearing of more than 17% of the unproductive, non-performing loans that the Portuguese banking industry was unfortunately living with at the time,” allowing it to attract capital to Portuguese from the four corners of the world, he says. banking.
“Today we enjoy the fruits of that investment. I like to think that today we live the future. The interest premiums that we paid, we stopped paying, the chronic budget deficits that we had, that we no longer have , public and private debt, which did not stop growth, fell. Between households and companies, there is 70 billion euros less in real terms over the last decade,” he stressed.
Source: DN
