"The Strait of Hormuz crisis is testing America, Europe and especially Romania. The strait's closure has created the same dilemma for all central banks: rising inflation, slowing economic growth and monetary policy caught between these two effects. However, this shock finds affected countries at very different levels of preparedness," said eToro Analyst Bogdan Maioreanu.

The United States, Europe and Romania now find themselves in concentric circles of vulnerability, with the distance between them widening week by week. 

At a global level, the problem is structural. An oil supply shock simultaneously causes inflation to rise and economic growth to fall, pushing central banks in two incompatible directions at the same time. Raising interest rates to combat inflation risks throwing already slowing economies into recession, while reducing rates to support economic growth risks allowing inflation to become entrenched.

In Romania, the shock from the Iran conflict hit an economy already facing the EU's highest inflation and a massive fiscal deficit under an EU-imposed public finance consolidation programme. Romania's inflation climbed to 9.9% in March, the highest since September 2025. Rising global energy prices now threaten to reverse the inflation slowdown trend recorded earlier this year and prevent the central bank from relaxing monetary policy in the near future.