United States

Excerpted from Doug Noland's Credit Bubble Bulletin blog,

Bubble Economy or Not?

By Moon of Alabama

U.S. Delivers 3,000 Tons Of Weapons And Ammo To Al-Qaeda & Co in Syria

The United States via its Central Intelligence Agency is still delivering thousands of tons of additional weapons to al-Qaeda and others in Syria.

The British military information service Janes found the transport solicitation for the shipment on the U.S. government website FedBizOps.gov. Janes writes:

After four long years of ensuring the detail behind the US Government’s role in running guns to Mexico (aka "Fast and Furious") never saw the light of day, the "most transparent administration in history" has finally released the requested documents to the House Oversight Committee. It is not lost on anyone that this is taking place well after it could do any significant damage to the Obama administration.

Nearly a decade since the housing bubble burst the dirty skeletons still emerge from the closet, and still nobody goes to jail.

In the latest example of how criminal Wall Street behavior leads to zero prison time and just more slaps on the wrist, overnight Warren Buffett's favorite bank, Wells Fargo, admitted to "deceiving" the U.S. government into insuring thousands of risky mortgages. Its "punishment" - a $1.2 billion settlement of a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit, the highest ever levied in a housing-related matter.

By John Mauldin of Mauldin Economics

These 2 Charts Show the Next Recession Will Blow Out the US Budget

The weakest recovery in modern history has stretched on for 69 months.

By 2017, it will be the third-longest recovery without a recession since the Great Depression. By 2018, it will be the second longest.

Only during the halcyon economic days of the 1960s have we seen a longer recovery; but that record, too, will be eclipsed sometime in 2019—if we don’t see a recession first.