Oil prices dip on de-escalation news

Oil prices deflate as stock markets cheered the decision to de-escalate in Iran. I'm David Brancaccio, with both countries asserting victory. We're now in the first hours of a two-week cease-fire in the U.S.-Iran conflict. The wholesale price of oil has just plunged nearly 16 percent. The New York price was pushing $118 yesterday. At the moment, it's just below $95 a barrel. Dan Coatsworth is head of markets at the UK-based investment platform AJ Bell. Just because we've got a two-week cease-fire doesn't mean to say this situation has been resolved. It 100 percent has not been resolved. It simply reached a turning point in the narrative. I think that the market reaction shows that there's some relief, but people aren't saying, few. Thank God this is all now done and dusted. Two and a half hours before U.S. stock markets open officially, Dow futures are up more than a thousand points, two and a half percent. S&P futures are up 2.6 percent. NASDAQ futures I see are up 3.4 percent now. The VIX index of stock market volatility is down 20 percent. U.S. Treasury bonds up sharply, the 10-year interest rate down at 4.24 percent. Now from markets to the real economy in which we live. It's from my drive down a stretch of Route 66 in the southwest to see what the economy looks like 100 years after the storied highway from Illinois to California came into being. We are now living through ferociously fast technological change, which is hitting and sometimes missing towns along this route. At the biggest Route 66 town in New Mexico, I experienced what many experts call our K-shaped economy. One leg up, one down. To stop that, get your kicks on Route 66 playing on repeat in my head while on the long road. A little Neil Young does the trick. In search of fried eggs, the Yelp app gives top marks to a place called Ancora Bakery in Albuquerque. It's got eggs, chorizo and surprise, job training. Well, we usually get about 70 to 100 people trained per year and we always get people placed. Trained as baristas in food service, Dominic Calliostro is one of the founders of this non-profit cafe and recovery program. When people are getting sober, they're real cranky and when they're getting out of relationships there's dysregulation and we're going to be extra supportive and get them working and regulated. We get them a resume, get them outfits, we get them mock interviews and prepare them to go get a permanent job in society. It's a 501C3 non-profit and cash flow is not easy. For a time recently, the cafe part of the recovery center went on hiatus and we found Google Maps listing it as permanently closed. But wrong, it is back open and there was a solid breakfast and an excellent latte. Donations, philanthropists, me and my wife, we collaborate with other places. Contributing to the operation is Ancora's work moving surplus restaurant food out to unhoused people in and around the neon corridors of Route 66 called Central Avenue in Albuquerque. In a moment a different side of a city flush with AI, science and tech money but not for flush with big private tech companies. If you're a business leader, Intuit QuickBooks Payroll is an essential tool that completely integrates payroll, time tracking, HR and your financials in a powerful all-in-one command center. Your juggling platforms are switching between vendors. All your data synced into one platform offering clarity and confidence to make smarter decisions and focus on what matters. This summer, QuickBooks Payroll evolves to support the entire team lifecycle, HR, time, benefits and payroll all working together in one connected system that fully integrates with your books. You'll be able to on-board employees in one seamless flow that feeds directly into payroll. Configure automated HR workflows for things like promotions or off-boarding and track performance time off and benefits alongside payroll. Upgrade your workflow with QuickBooks Payroll today and get ready for the brand new tools coming soon. More at quickbooks.com slash workforce. That's quickbooks.com slash workforce. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. At Albuquerque's Museum of Nuclear Science and History, six blocks from Route 66, there's a loop of President Truman's big announcement in 1945. But the greatest marvel is not the size of the enterprise, its secrecy or its cost, but the achievement of scientific brains in making it work. A lot of that work was done in this region, which is now home to three national labs, Los Alamos, Air Force Research and Sandia. Right here we still find one of the greatest collections of scientific minds, with many working at the frontiers of artificial intelligence. Recently a Brookings report identified this waypoint on Route 66 as an AI mini-cluster, but certainly not a superstar AI hub. You would think even that by accident by now we would have very successful companies into Mexico. Albuquerque Montgomery is a noted AI scientist and entrepreneur based here. We have quite a few small companies that have been successful, but we've never had a major company succeed in New Mexico in technology, which is probably the biggest gap in the world that I'm aware of anyhow between the dollars, R&D dollars that are spent versus the commercialization and the opportunities for employment. Montgomery is the driving force behind a pioneering company called K-Yield that uses a neuro-symbolic flavor of AI very different from the currently popular, but often wrong, large language models. Among use cases for his tech is helping to predict and prevent corporate disasters. Despite all of this and his previous experience as a venture capitalist, Montgomery says he is not expecting a New Mexican invidia or anthropic to emerge. Since government dominates the economy, we don't have what typically you have are a bunch of wealthy angel investors who have existing businesses that are also early stage customers. Those are the things that are missing. So the low hanging fruit is to become a military contractor. And after you beat your head against the wall as an entrepreneur in New Mexico for a while, most of them will take that route. Or the route west on 66 toward the coast. A lot of times they fly after they've been acquired by companies on the coast. Silicon Valley is pretty well-dowed for cherry picking. New Mexico tech transfer. On the flip side, New Mexico has taken its cut of burgeoning oil and gas revenues and built a $70 billion sovereign wealth fund to invest in entrepreneurial local companies. And using fresh data, New Mexico can boast its now number one in the nation for growth in median or typical family income. Yet New Mexico also ranks in the bottom three worst in the country for its poverty rate. This bend in the road on 66 is shaped like a K. All of my economy 66 pieces are accumulating at Marketplace.org. I'm David Brancaccio with the Morning Report from APM American Public Media.