Business

Excerpted from Doug Noland's Credit Bubble Bulletin,

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

 

– Warren Buffett

 

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One of the biggest quandaries of this cycle for the US economy has been the amount and growth of commercial bank loans. Virtually non-existent for the first three years of the centrally-planned new normal, something changed in 2012 at which point US bank loans, led by Commercial and Industrial or C&I lending growing at a double-digit pop, started to rise at an impressive pace, asking many to wonder: maybe the biggest driver for a sustainable economic recovery is in fact present, because where there is loan demand, there is velocity of money.

Four days ago, we again profiled Canada’s unraveling economy.

For those who may be late to the story, the inexorable decline in crude prices that’s played out over the past 13 or so months means the country’s oil boom is now its oil bust and nowhere is the sharp reversal in fortunes more apparent than Alberta, the heart oil Canada’s oil patch. 

The Punchline's Abe Gulkowitz is the author of our favorite chart-only newsletter, and as 2015 draws to a close, it is obvious that he has been very busy.