Romanian Leu Ends Steady vs Euro

"Wide spreads between bid and ask are evidence for a chaotic market, [...] chaos, generated in the wake of central bank interventions, which usually bring large volumes to the market," one dealer told SeeNews. She said she expected the leu to trade in a similar range next week.

The leu has been losing ground against the euro in the last two weeks as concerns about how the country's new government will handle an expected economic slowdown fuelled negative sentiment among investors towards the currencies of emerging markets and especially towards the leu, dealers have said. They suspected a central bank intervention on Tuesday, aiming to stop the local currency from slumping further and since then the leu has been traded around the 4.3 mark, which, traders said, was difficult to go beyond one.

Romania's central bank, BNR, set its reference exchange rate at 4.2655 lei per euro on Friday compared at 4.2764 lei on Thursday. For the U.S. dollar, the BNR set the reference exchange rate at 3.2139 lei versus Thursday's 3.2491 lei.

Turnover on the interbank leu deposit market fell to some 2.0 billion lei on Thursday from 2.43 billion lei on Wednesday. The BNR will issue Friday's figures on Monday.

Interest rates on overnight leu deposits fell to an average of 10.87%/11.90% on Friday from 12.01%/12.84% on Thursday.

Following are Friday's average bid and ask quotes of commercial banks on Romania's interbank market. They were calculated at 1100 (0900 GMT) by the BNR, based on data provided by 10 commercial banks (in pct):