The economic crisis of 2008-2009, when confidence was completely lost and lending stopped, is unlikely to repeat in Ukraine, Executive Director of the Bleyzer Foundation Oleg Ustenko has said.

"At that time there was an outflow of investors and deposits. There was pegging to a single rate, which meant that the NBU within a few months burned 3.4 billion dollars in reserves. Such a reduction cannot be seen now. At that time, credit default swaps started increasing so sharply that the process became generally uncontrolled. At that time markets were closed for the Ukrainian government. Now Ukraine can place [securities] on foreign markets and feel good," ubr.ua quoted the expert as saying.

In addition, according to Ustenko, an important reason for the emergence of the crisis was a number of non-performing loans. "Moreover, the portfolio of bank assets was formed so that 50% of loans were issued in foreign currency. This is unacceptable. This was a huge mistake by the central bank, which allowed doing that," he said.

Ustenko also noted that this year's current account deficit could reach 7% of GDP under the negative scenario. "The issue concerns about 15 billion dollars. But these are not 25 billion [dollars] that had to appear in 2009. Risks exist here, but it's also the question of the adequacy of economic policy," the executive director of the Bleyzer Foundation said.

Ukrinform