the nikkei closed one 00 points. all u.s. mashlgts are closed for president s day. markets were up overseas. asian markets climbed monday on chi china s decision to encourage lending and boost its economy. meanwhile, japan s economy is off to a slow start this last year. oil prices jumped to a nine-month high after iran said it held the crude exports ahead of sanctions. another bail out is only a short-term fix to the country s economic problems. elsewhere, over the weekend, the cofounder of wynn resorts was bought out to overseas gambling
that s not why we re playing it. that s a healthy ego. you got to go with the joke. i know. we re just teasing. just want to honor my man. this is in honor of don cornelius. we announced his death yesterday. soul train, did you watch soul train ever? am i right, saturday morning? did you pass by the channel or actually stop? we have a lot to get to. let me introduce our panel to you will cain, john fugelsan, i mangle your name all the time. soledad o brien that s cuban irish. roland martin is back, as well. all right, take it down. here we go. let s get to our starting point this morning which is mitt romney. yesterday should have been the victory lap, the victory lap. but then you had to come in. i did nothing but ask a question and a follow up. here s what he said in my interview yesterday morning. i m in this race because i care about americans. i m not concerned about the very poor. we have a safety net there. if it needs a repair, i ll fix it.
hire. the question is what that does to the unemployment rate. of course, as the jobs come back, you continue to see more people who come back into the workforce. that is the deciding factor what happens with the major overall unemployment picture. very good news for the markets. right now, it looks like the mashlgts are going to open flat though. that may be in part because we also got housing starts about an hour ago. the housing starts was a disappointing figure. we saw a drop of more than 4.1% to 657,000. that was a bigger drop than had been expected. so mixed economic news out there. of course, that all plays right into the campaign and the stuff that you re watching so closely every day. chuck? it sure does. thank you, becky. the daily rundown will be back in 30 seconds.
points. that was after tokyo s nikkei stock exchange posted a more than 10% drop, the biggest one-day drop since 2008. japan is one of the biggest producer and sellers of goods worldwide. automakers, consumer electronics giants all suffered production losses because of the quake. we have our team from cnbc on what could be a growing economic crisis. melissa francis is at cnbc world headquarters and phil lebow in chicago. give me a sense of the mashlgts and how what s happening in japan is rippling around the world. we saw it right away overnight. you saw the nikkei drop. they have stabilized and come back a little bit as we saw futures in japan recover a little bit. mainly it s selling across the board. a liquidation everywhere you look. gold has been down, oil, silver, everything you see. it s been a tough day in the