Gerjali: Credit rates could go up 8%

He says the establishment of interest is one of the key mechanisms and that this has been done at the request of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Gerjaliu, says the increase in interest has been promoted much earlier.

The European Central Bank, which has been required to increase by 2 percent interest, must be understood. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have urged this to declare a fight against inflation that has engulfed the European Union and many other countries in this direction, as well as Kosovo. On the other hand, this rise in interest in the European Central Bank is used for the fact that it is a key mechanism to combat the effect of inflation that has hit Europe. In this direction many countries today have economic recession, and a situation like this cannot possibly escape even Kosovo. What characterizes Kosovo more is that the level of economic development cannot be compared to European countries”, Gerjaliu says of Online Economy.

According to him, if it continues with the current inflation trend, the increase in interest could range by up to 8 percent. The blow, Gerjaliu says, will have small businesses and new innovation centres.

On the other hand, we have the Central Bank, which is recently ahead of many challenges in the absence of a real Governor and in the absence of comfortable procedures of necessary laws and transparency, all this will affect citizens and businesses from Kosovo as well. It has been warned that by June of this year the interest will be close to 6 percent. If it goes on this trend, there will probably be increases that could go up to 7.5 or 8 percent. It's very disturbing that it will be a blow to small businesses, it will be a blow to existing businesses, and it will be very difficult to have credit for new innovative centres that would have been in place for development”, Grizalou said, as he spoke of the governor's absence of the Kosovo Central Bank.

It requires that the future Governor's priority be to liberalise the banking market.

I believe that one of the future Governor's priorities in Kosovo is to liberalise the banking market because Kosovo needs strong new banks. We have several banks in Kosovo which are very powerful, very active in the country they come from, but in Kosovo they are only a decade and are not in the function of development. We need to advance a well-initiated public-private dialogue, we need to have a loan guarantee fund that's going to be active, and at that point we can talk about the decline of interest”, Gerjaliu says.

Gerjaliu views the halting of interest rates as impossible, as in his opinion this issue has not hit Kosovo alone. He says Kosovo has had to be prepared.

The “is unable to think that it has been possible to prevent because this is not a phenomenon that has hit Kosovo alone, comes from reports, every movement, any recommendation from European banks in particular from the European Central Bank transferred in a chain. It's taken time to be prepared to make some calculations so that the effects are lower than they will be from now on. True, a lot recently talked about banking profits, but let's not forget the same time even banks pay their own risk. The main guarantee of credit and normal functioning of banks is political stability, this Kosovo does not. The second factor is rule of order and law, and the third is market plurality”, Gerjaliu said.