At 3PM in New York, West Texas Intermediate is up 5% and Brent North Sea is over the moon, rallying more than 6%.

The thudding crud you hear falling to earth is crude oil. West Texas Intermediate has demolished the $27 per barrel barrier and looks set to hurtle down further. Brent North Sea is not far behind.

WTI is down 6.7% on the day, its lowest settlement since 2003. Brent, while down, is up off its earlier lows.

What are the tealeaves saying fundamentally? The huge number of signals, cross signals, coded messages, encrypted ideas and so forth make it very difficult to come to a clear understanding.

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.