Global markets respond to the attack on Iran

The U.S. and Israel's war with Iran is working its way through the world's financial markets. From Marketplace, I'm Sabri Beneshwar in for David Brancaccio. Oil prices have been jumping around this morning, but you can bet they're up about 6 to 7 percent. Gold, a safe haven for investors, is up about 2 percent. Let's talk about it with Julia Coronado. She's founder of Macro Policy Perspectives and a professor at UT Austin. Hey, Julia. Good morning. So let's start with oil prices. They are up. Supply is threatened. Does that persist and show up at the gas pump? It probably won't take long for it to show up at the gas pump. It's a pretty big jump. And, you know, we just don't know how long this conflict is going to last. So, yeah, I would say that consumers will be seeing higher gas prices pretty quickly. Moving on to another corner of the market, bond yields. Usually, bonds are a place people put their money when they get a little freaked out, and that results in the yield dropping. That happened, and then it didn't. What do you make of that? Well, I think we're in a world where markets and investors are increasingly uncertain about where their money is safe. That sort of fits this pattern we've seen in recent months where the typical flight to safety doesn't favor U.S. interest rates. It's gotten confused in a world where the U.S. has been increasingly the source of uncertainty and chaos rather than the steady hand. Julia Coronado, founder of Macro Policy Perspectives, thank you so much. My pleasure. The exact picture of the U.S. economy is a little blurry right now. This Friday, economists hope the picture will come into focus a bit. That is when we get the jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Marketplace's Carla Javier has more. It's the one report that can provide some clarity says Michael Gapin at Morgan Stanley The jobs number is still the most important number that we receive about the economy every month He says it tells economists both about the health of the business sector if it willing to expand or not and the health of the consumer, if they'll be willing to spend or not. The U.S. consumer is about two-thirds of the overall economy. Most households consume out of labor market income. And even if unemployment doesn't rise sharply, Gregory Dacco at EY Parthenon says, The fact that we have a jobless expansion and compression efforts on the wage front by business leaders that are cost conscious leads to an environment where income growth is slowing. If prices inflate more than incomes grow, that limits spending ability. As we start to see further deceleration in income growth, that will constrain more and more families across the U.S. And while savings and credit, he says, can help, he does wonder how much longer consumers will be able to keep spending like they have. I'm Carla Javier for Marketplace. To be continued... You've probably heard by now about a social media platform called Maltbook. It's not for people, it for AI agents to talk to other AI agents Here an example read out loud by an AI agent There a temptation as agents to automate everything every repetitive task But here what I learned Some things should stay manual So on that very question of what humans should be doing, we've got Stephanie Hughes, who's hosting Marketplace Tech right now. Hi, Steph. Hey, Sabri. So, Steph, Moltbook was, is a fun possible glimpse into humanity's destruction. But also, it was what is called vibe-coded. What does vibe-coded mean? Yeah, so this is the term for when a person doesn't do the coding to create an application or website. An AI does. And it means that you can whip up an app or a site really, really quickly, but you might not really understand how it works. So that, though, in the case of Moldbook, created some security issues, right? Can you explain that? Yeah, it did. So the cloud security company, Wiz, did a review of Moldbook shortly after it came online, and they found they were able to access sensitive information on the platform, a lot of the internal workings. And Wiz told me when they let Motebook know about the problems, they did get them fixed. But I talked to Ami Lutwak, he's Wiz's chief technology officer, and he said this is a good example of the kinds of issues that can come up when a site or an app is vibe-coded. So the app always looks very professional. Behind the scenes, actually, it's just one person that vibe-coded it. Is that great? Yes. But maybe we should say this site was vibe-coded. Be careful. Motebook does do this. It says built for agents by agents on the site's homepage. But not all Vibe-coded sites do. And people might not even understand the implications of it. How hard is it to Vibe-code something? It is remarkably easy. I went to one of the platforms that lets you use AI to build stuff. And I want my seven-year-old to learn how to type. So I asked the AI to create a game that my son Will could play. And in like four minutes, it ginned up this game where letters fell from the sky and it was really colorful. And the player has to press the right letter on the keyboard to catch them. And I tried it out with my son. G K And the cool thing is you can actually change the game as you playing it Asked it to be slower I asked the AI to slow down the speed the letters were coming down and it worked Yeah, that's pretty cool. So how disruptive could vibe coding be in tech? It sounds like very. It could be a really big deal. There are actually new companies cropping up that advise people and companies how to vibe code. One of them is called Giga Catalyst. And I talked to its CEO, Namanye Goyal. One of my customers is a mechanic. He built an app and now he's managing all of his technicians, his mechanics, and the orders that are coming in with his own vibe coded app. Goyal says it's just way faster and cheaper to spin up apps and websites by vibe coding them than paying a coder to do it. But he says people and companies need to really think through whether they want to give an AI sensitive information. Stephanie Hughes, thank you so much. Yep, it's a little bit like that line from one of the Harry Potter books. Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain. In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshaw with the Marketplace Morning Report. From APM, American Public Media. America's housing system is under strain. From natural disasters to the rising cost of shelter, the challenges we face and the solutions we embrace will shape how we live for the next hundred years. I'm David Brancaccio, host of the Marketplace Morning Report, and I've been working with This Old House Radio Hour on a special podcast episode that explores how Americans are reimagining housing in this changing world. It's called Building Tomorrow. From wildfire-resistant houses in California to tiny home communities in Texas to a super-duper energy-efficient house in the Northeast, this special blends innovation, new business models, and personal stories to explore how resilience, affordability, and our climate reality are redefining what home looks like. To listen, go to Marketplace Morning Report in your podcast app.