Are all financial crises created equal? Wholesale funding and two financial crises

Abstract

We use financial information on banks from Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania to examine the role of wholesale funding on the transmission of financial crises to bank lending, as well as to study the response of financial institutions in different regions during the crises. We consider the role of wholesale funding during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and Asian Financial Crisis (AFC). Our results suggest that during the GFC, wholesale funding dependence had a negative effect on loans growth across regions, but with substantial regional heterogeneity. The growth of loans from financial institutions in Asia and Europe was consistently sensitive to wholesale funding dependence. Although wholesale funding did not play a significant role in the transmission mechanism of the AFC, a subsample of financial institutions in Asia, who depended more heavily on wholesale funding, experienced a faster loan growth and may have been able to better withstand the crisis.