The Credit Crunch Is Back: Banks Scramble To Collateralize Loans To Record Levels

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.

 

12,000 Oil Tanker Trucks Parked At Iraq-Turkey Border Aren't Carrying ISIS Crude, Kurds Swear

In our classic piece “ISIS Oil Trade Full Frontal: "Raqqa's Rockefellers", Bilal Erdogan, KRG Crude, And The Israel Connection,” we discussed how Masoud Barzani and the Iraqi Kurds transport some 600,000 b/d of crude to the Turkish port of Ceyhan in defiance of SOMO amid an ongoing budget dispute between Baghdad and Erbil.

Turkey facilitates this trade and we suggested that ISIS (which Turkey is suspected of supporting in order that the group might continue to destabilize Assad) may be using the same networks to get its illicit oil to market. 

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