The award for best performance of a leading stock index was given to the Nikkei. It was down today “only” 0.54%. Worst on the day was Shanghai, which was off 3.5%.

The NASDAQ did not do much better than Shanghai, off around 3.00%. All other exchanges lined up somewhere in between those extremes. The Dow is looking to close off over 400 points.

The current relationship between the price of crude oil and pricing levels of world equities is more than confusing. It is particularly intense when it comes to American equities, which have many huge energy companies as components of their special index.

If you feel the skin on your face rippling backward, that’s the force of 2 or maybe 3Gs. But you’re feeling something entirely different in the economy right now. And it’s a bit scary.

The very intense, 7G ride in the markets is at hand.

The Dow, the S&P 500, and NASDAQ in particular, are plummeting. Call it approximately a drop of 2, 2-1/2 and 3 percent respectively.

Now the reason is oil, oil and more oil. Oceans of the stuff, rivers, lakes, streams. It’s a far cry when, sometime around 1975 it was predicted the whole planet would be out of oil by 2005.

We won’t go as far as to call in the elite fractal experts from the math department at the University of Chicago in order to clarify the recent markets in terms of chaos theory, but let’s admit that right now everything seems topsy-turvy.

U.S. equities shrugged off a mammoth new jobs number, clinging instead to the rate ramifications of the swaggering data. The report showed that new positions created in December numbered 292,000, a data point that will sure be revised upward (as were the numbers for October and November).

The question of the day is whether U.S. equities are in a real (corrective) contraction, meaning a bear market, or is this just a little sweeping out of the ashes from the fireplace of 2015.

The release of the Federal Open Market Committees minutes from its December policy meeting did little to affect trends in today’s markets.

When it comes to crude oil, oversupply, overproduction and immense in-the-ground reserves are trumping the chaos in diplomatic relations between two key players in the Middle East.

You can dismiss any notion that today’s rolling and tumbling equities were in any way affected by the brouhaha over the execution of a Shiite cleric by Saudi Arabia. It probably was an inordinately stupid thing to do by the Saudis, but Iran did react swiftly on the official level to muffle the crazy protests that “the man in the street” conducted.