Banks’ Cross-Border Borrowing and Currency Shock: Evidence from an Emerging Economy

Using granular data from the Turkish banking system, we exploit a large currency depreciation in 2018 to explore whether, and how, banks’ cross-border FX borrowing evolved after the exchange rate shock. Our bank-level empirical findings show that a currency shock has a significant and negative impact on cross-border interbank FX borrowing, but the large foreign currency buffers held by banks mitigate the negative impact of the crisis on their FX borrowing. Furthermore, we find that the impact differs depending on the characteristics of the banks or the regional diversification of the lender banks. Sub-sample analysis via connectedness shows that the mitigating impact of an FX buffer is lower for strongly connected banks, while the analysis by business types indicates that the impact is higher for development banks. On the other hand, we find that the cross-border FX borrowing of resident banks decreases with the FX shock if the lender bank is located in advanced economies, but it increases if the lender banks are from emerging economies or the Middle East. Our results show the importance of diversification of funding partners to alleviate the negative impacts of an abrupt foreign currency depreciation on FX borrowing of the resident banks, i.e. to have a stable source of foreign exchange funding.