Adam Glapinski spoke about the euro. “We mustn’t leave”

Discussions about whether Poland should join the euro zone have subsided, but they may resume as the election campaign accelerates. On the occasion of a conference on monetary sovereignty, the president of the National Bank of Poland, Adam Glapinski, mentioned the benefits of owning one’s own currency.

Adam Glapinski: Zloty is one of the components of Poland’s economic success

“Having its own currency brings many advantages, because its own currency allows for a sovereign monetary policy, Poland can enjoy stable economic growth for many years,” the head of the central bank wrote in a letter to Monetary Sovereignty participants. Forum”, which took place on Tuesday in Warsaw.

“Zloty is one of the components of Poland’s economic success,” the president added. Therefore, “we must not and cannot give up the złoty.”

According to the president, evidence of the importance of the national currency was the demand for cash, which we observed in the early days of the war in Ukraine, when thousands of Poles, fearing the prolongation of the conflict, withdrew money from ATMs.

The amount of cash in circulation increased during the pandemic

Previously, the launch of ATMs took place in the spring of 2020, when the uncertainty associated with the pandemic forced many people to err on the side of cash. The result was a snowball effect: even people who had not previously planned to withdraw funds decided to go to an ATM when they saw how many people were withdrawing money. No one wanted to be the one to run out of money in the event of an outage in online banking or suspension of payment cards.

Fear led to the fact that some ATMs periodically ran out of banknotes. This added to the fear, leading to even longer queues after refilling ATMs.

Increased demand for cash has appeared every time the government announced new restrictions related to the pandemic. In October 2020, when, among other things, a ban on receiving guests in catering establishments was announced (valid until May 2021), and the number of infected people grew very quickly, there were PLN 7 billion 873 million more cash in circulation than a month earlier.

This was the largest cash gain since April 2020.

“It is worth emphasizing that in itself the fact of an increase in cash in circulation is something normal. The pool grows almost every month. Just 10 years ago, we kept less than PLN 100 billion in cash. Now we are talking about almost 300 billion zlotys, ”the money.pl website explained at the time.