Yesterday the GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini sent out 19 successive tweets sharing his assessment of the Republican race so far. I hope someone will Storify them so you can all easily read them, but until then, follow the link above. His basic argument is that the GOP race is settling into a pattern. Trump has a hard core of supporters nationally, but he can’t seem to grow beyond it. They are, however, unshakable in their support of him:

Oil prices limped higher overnight in their ubiquitous carry-driven way, only to tumble quickly this morning as the reality that, as Goldman says "at record levels, this production freeze doesn't help at all") and clear indications from the meetings in Tehran that Iran will do 'whatever it takes' to increase its production to pre-sanctions levels. WTI is back below $30.

As Bloomberg notes,

Any output-freeze agreement among key oil producers is being dismissed out of hand by oil bears.

 

In 17 of the 19 times in the last 100 years that Industrial Production has contracted for 3 consecutive months, the US economy has entered recession. Today 0.7% drop YoY is the 3rd month of declines.

The only times in the last 100 years that 3 months of US Industrial Production contraction has not coincided with a recession was in 1934 and 1952... (and the current decline is larger than 1952's in aggregate)

While we have generally disagreed with Morgan Stanley's Adam Parker flipflopping on stocks some two years ago, or just as the market was topping out, we can't find fault with his latest note released today in which he openly admits that "our portfolio advice has been pretty horrendous lately. As my 90-year old Latin teacher used to tell the class in 1985, “son, you are in left field, without a glove, with the sun in your eyes."

Today's batch of housing data, namely the January update of housing starts and permits, which as a reminder has a quite substantial "confidence interval" of between 10.5% and 28.3%, was largely uneventful.