keith fitzgerald is with us from portland oregon. the chinese made this move, their stock market dropped 8%, biggest drop in years and years and years. without getting too technical why should i care? why should an 8% drop there affect me here? >> i give you three reasons, stuart. first, 40-60% of the s&p 500 sales come from overseas a dominant percentage of that is from asia. two, there's a direct relationship between margin and stock market levels. if it's healthy, the markets will be healthy. what china is doing is proactively tapping on the brakes something i might add, the fed had the chance to do in the early '90s and the mid 2000s. neither of which they did. third, china imports 99 cents on the dollar, and we better hope their markets are healthy enough to keep buying. it's very important to us. stuart: are they trying to slow their economy down or slow their stock market down? >> a little bit of both. they're trying to get rid of the excess again, which is something that the free markets in this country want to do, but fed and

we have more earnings coming out later, keith fitzgerald. are we underestimating the impact those earnings can have on our market and overestimating the impact that monetary policy can have right now? >> i think that's very much the case. now, to the point, i think that the earnings have been set so artificially low as to be laughable so that beats are going to come very quickly and easily whether traders buy in that or not is thor question. but going forward i think we'll see a trillion dollars or more that's going to be a stimulus by virtue of this implicit gas tax credit by low fuel costs that's going to be right to the middle class' pocket. president obama talked about it last night. he completely ignored the real issue, which is cash in the pocket works and i think that's going to hit the registers a quarter or two from now and that's where the surprises will start to come. >> that's right. >> we'll have a little more on where people are spending those savings coming up in a bit. for now, everybody, thank you very much. >> thanks, guys.

. >> we had a prediction yesterday from keith fitzgerald.d go down five, maybe seven this month. i take it you agree with that. >> i have no idea how much we will go down. gold stocks are already up 10% in 2015. we are only a few days into the trading year. they are now threatening to break out. gold has been strong. even with the dollar strengthening. the tide is turning. >> we are now down 132 points. you are looking at a 400-point drop. fifty points actually. we are up a couple percentage points. i want to bring in andy from houston. our oil guy. we are up 48 and small change. we are on the verge of hitting 47. are we anywhere near a bottom, andy? >> i do not think so. oil demand goes down in the u.s. to the refinery. stuart: an economic slowdown that is reducing the demand for oil. is that what is going on here? >> i think pretty much. the oil sale has been a spectacular success. >> you think that the price of gasoline will go down more? stuart: we are up 4802. there you go. we are dropping almost 10% in the first trading week of 2015. o

come on in keith fitzgerald, from portland, were. >> i think amazon, i would not touch with a 10-footd not even go with netflix except for on a short term basis. companies like this. >> you have to explain this to me. you do not particularly like the stock price. these are streaming companies. explain to me how storage in the cloud is a way to make money. >> if you think about how that streaming has to get to you it has to go up into the cloud. that information has to be stored and then delivered to whatever device you are using. it may be overpriced. the space to look for is those content delivery companies. stuart: streaming increases. you have to go to the guys that are feeding that stuff right at you. stuart: all right. we will check them out. we will see you again soon. gas for your car. the price of jet fuel is down. does that mean you will be paying less to fly? [laughter] maybe you should dream on. the founder. are we going to see airfares come down? >> yes. currently, jeff -- the implication is that airlines will save about 22 billion in fuel costs. that suggests about a 16%

keith fitzgerald. i cannot do the math. i have not done the math.bout it. it is the tail end of the prior year. plus, we have the polar vortex. we are weaning off the stimulus. stuart: the polar vortex. >> to me, that is a lot like the dog ate my homework. stuart: are you kidding me? people actually said the weather is partially responsible for a 300-point loss on the dow? >> not today stuart. they begin to draw conclusions and inferences that are not there. we had a cold snap and three weeks later everyone is talking about how it will affect all the numbers. stuart: i want you to take these one at a time. just over 200. buy it? >> no i would not buy it here. it will break 200. stuart: how about amazon? >> i would not touch amazon, personally. microsoft and google are eating it. i think the investors that are interested are aly baba. >> home run. oil is down. stronger if you go with oil prices being down. they do not carry a lot of dead. i do not like social media stocks. numbers are going the wrong direction. users are the climbing. i think that is

get to the closing bell exchange lindsey piegi and jack and keith fitzgerald and we've got steve liesman and rick santelli to talk about things. steve, give us a play by play on the fed minutes. you know not a lot of surprises. we knew what came out of that meeting in the press conference. right? >> they're talking about global economic weakness. they're talking about the affects of lower oil prices. but overall, what they see is that the u.s. economy is able to withstand that some seeing risk to the up with side. maybe a touch aukish with one comment that the fed could raise rates at the current core pce level and they qualify that saying they would have to see movement towards a goal of 2%. overall, you know i'm more focused today than on the minutes with the data of adp number at 240. small business hiring at a record since 2006. and finally, that trade deficit number guys showing the effects of lower oil prices on the u.s. economy, that's a boost to gdp. our cnbc rapid update up by 0.4% and looking at a 3% or 3.2% fourth quarter growth and this is a quarter that a lot of people thoug

keith fitzgerald from money map press, kenny polcari from o'neill securities is here with us at the big board and steve liesman and rick santelli. steve liesman, first of all, the thing we had to puzzle this morning, the retail sales number from this morning. much weaker than expected when we all expected better things because of lower gasoline prices. >> it was a weak number across the board and you also had downward november revisions. i will say that the combination of october/november enough to power ahead overall consumer spending according to most estimates to a pretty good number for the total fourth quarter but really we have a puzzle. when you look at the market and what it has to see, what's in its vision you have these negatives that are coming out of the oil fields. we got a bunch of that in the beige book where they talked about things like hiring freezing and layoffs. that's the negative side. and it's not clear to the market that there is this upside. i suspect there will be. i think december is going to be seen as an anomaly but right now the market has the data in front