The Bucharest stock market took a dive, among the steepest in the last couple of years, when the main Bucharest Stock Exchange index, the BET, went down to 4,508 points at the beginning of this week. The value is similar to the ones recorded in the second half of September 2008, when the global financial markets were in shock after the Lehman Brothers collapse.

The BET index further decreased on Tuesday on the Bucharest Stock Exchange, reaching 4,419 points. The drop of this index was of 8.39 percent on Monday, followed by a decline of 1.97 percent on Tuesday.

The recent plunge was mainly triggered by the situation in the US, which has been downgraded from triple A to AA+ on Friday last week by Standard and Poor's. The US had increased its debt ceiling earlier last week. These have sent a shock wave on stock markets across the globe.

The BET index reflects trading with 10 blue chips listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange. Shares in OMV Petrom, one of these blue chips went down by 7.8 percent on Monday, after a decline of 6.7 percent on Friday last week. The drop continued on Tuesday, but was reduced to 0.95 percent. Romania's Fondul Proprietatea's share price went down on the BSE by 5.2 percent on Monday, after the 4.2 percent decline on Friday last week. On Tuesday, it went further down by 3.9 percent. Shares of lender BRD Societe Generale declined by 6.9 percent on Friday, followed by 7.2 percent on Monday and further by 4.6 on Tuesday this week.

BET-Fi, the index which records the evolution of shares from the five SIF investment funds and from Fondul Proprietatea, took a dive of 8.7 percent on Monday, and went further down by 4.9 percent on Tuesday, reaching a value of 17.508.

Trading on the Bucharest Stock Exchange has increased during the last couple of days, compared to the average in the last month. On Monday this week, trading reached EUR 22.8 million, in 8,600 deals. The volume of deals went even higher on Tuesday, to 13,417 deals, with a value of EUR 30.9 million. On Thursday last week, trading reached a record EUR 37 million in just 3,600 deals.

For comparison, the trading value on the BSE on July 25, of EUR 21.7 million, was covered by only 2,100 deals. Besides the trading values during these last four days, the trading peak of the last month on the BSE was the one of EUR 21.7 million.

Corina Saceanu, corina@romania-insider.com

(photo source: Agerpres)