Buy Now, Pay Later Impacts Credit Score? & Novo Nordisk Breaks Up w/ Hims & Hers
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Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, buy now, pay later loans are coming to credit scores, so cherish that 800 while it lasts. Then a tsunami of job applications has hit LinkedIn, a tsunami that AI created but might also be able to fix. It's Tuesday, June 24th. Let's ride. ♪

Look, we all know your iPhone takes a pretty good picture, but I'm going to have to raise you the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This cutting edge telescope years in the making released its first images of deep space yesterday, and they were pretty dang epic considering the observatory contains the world's most powerful digital camera with 67 times more megapixels than your iPhone 16 Pro and a resolution so high that it could capture a golf ball

on the moon and requires 400 ultra HD TV screens to show a single image. Astronomers have been waiting a long time for this camera to come online because it's going to provide a transformational snapshot of space as humanity has never seen it before. That can include discovering a potential ninth planet in our solar system or more

The Wall Street Journal described it as a celestial flipbook that would capture 38 billion objects. It is so cool. It's already gotten to work, too, within 10 hours of turning it on. It found 2,100 new asteroids, usually in the middle of the night.

We ID about 20,000 a year or so. Off to a flying start. But I also want to call out why it's located high in the Andes Mountains in Chile. The BBC put it well. It's very high, it's very dry, and it's very dark. Darkness is so important for a telescope to work properly that you're not even allowed to use full beam headlights on the bus ride up to the mountain. So, Neil, if a cautious bus ride is what it takes to find some aliens, then I think that's a pretty worthy trade.

Now a word from our sponsor, Domain Money. One of the reasons we've loved working with Domain over the past few weeks is that they know a one-size-all approach doesn't make sense. Do Toby and I wear the same size shirt? No, I've been hitting the gym. So why should we get the same financial advice? When it comes to your financial life, you can often get rebutted

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okay let's quickly get you caught up with the latest events in the middle east and the market reaction a ceasefire between israel and iran announced by president trump last night appears precarious after israel accused iran of launching two missiles at it three hours after the agreement went into effect israel has vowed to strike back against tehran while iran denied that it fired missiles toward israel the flare-up came after a whirlwind day in which iran retaliated against the u.s's weakened attacks against its nuclear sites

sending missiles toward an American airbase in Qatar. This was seen as an attempt to de-escalate the situation as the attack was telegraphed well beforehand to the U.S. and Qatar, and no casualties were reported. And Toby, investors clearly breathed a sigh of relief. Yeah, they were certainly happy to see a de-escalation. Stocks had a muted day overall yesterday, but finished in the green, while futures are slightly up there.

this morning. Oil prices have also fallen about 5% since the proposed ceasefire was announced. Oil is now trading at its lowest point in two weeks, so it's pared back all the gains that it has since the conflict broke out. So if this ceasefire holds, which is still an if at this point, it will be met

positively by markets. Okay, moving on. Burrito loans are coming to your credit score. Fair Isaac Corp, or FICO, which creates the most popular credit score in the U.S., said yesterday that it would incorporate buy now, pay later loans into its new models, the first time it's ever introduced a score to account for a type of loan. The goal is to solve one of the biggest challenges that's emerged from the explosion of buy now, pay later services, a

Thank you.

with two new credit scoring models coming later this year that banks and credit card companies can use to evaluate consumers' credit worthiness. Toby, I guess you could call being factored into credit reports buy now, pay later's bar mitzvah. It's all grown up and ready to be taken seriously. And the numbers back it up. The value of buy now, pay later transactions in the U.S. is expected to reach $108

billion this year, up from $94 billion a year ago. Yeah, and thank goodness because the visibility into these loans have just been so, so murky. A Bankrate survey in May found that nearly half of all BNPL users experienced at least one money issue. Overspending topped the list. So we're not really sure how much people are spending on these platforms. I mean, the platforms themselves do give us some data. Last month, Klarna reported that its losses from defaulted loans were

Now, the question is, will this be a credit-based

builder or a credit buster because it's not all necessarily bad if people are taking out these really they're really short term loans. It's very different than a credit card. But if you're just taking out a short term loan, paying it back quickly, will that increase your credit score? And potentially it could welcome a bunch of new people into the credit system and help them build credit because often people use buy now pay later services don't necessarily have a credit card and they're using these services instead.

FICO actually ran a study on this. They simulated the credit score impact of buy now, pay later loans. And the results may surprise you. They showed that the majority of consumers with five or more BNPL loans from a firm would experience higher scores or no score changes at all.

Now, one of the reasons, one of the main reasons that Buy Now, Pay Later services had withheld all this data from credit reporting agencies is that they feared that it would ding credit scores. But here's FICO saying, actually, it helps boost them. And what is interesting about just the whole credit industry in general is that it kind of works like iPhone releases. So FICO is obviously very widely used by lenders. It's kind of like the gold standard. They say that 90% of lenders

people use its scores when making lending decisions. That being said, though, a lot of them are using older models because they've set everything up to support FICO 6. But now FICO is actually on to FICO Score 10, FICO Score 10T. Those are the most up

dated ones, but a lot of people are still on FICO score eight, which was released back in 2009. So they think this is like adding a cool new camera to an iPhone, bringing in that buy now pay later data is something that will make lenders upgrade their systems and, you know, buy the new iPhone in this case. So it is just fascinating that they've been trying to get people up to date, but they've been slow to adopt new models. This might actually put, push a lot of lenders over the finish line.

Hims and Hers has been a Wall Street favorite for most of this year, but the telehealth company came tumbling down yesterday after news that its partnership with Novo Nordisk was hitting the fritz. In a press release, the maker of Wagovi said it was cutting ties with Hims and Hers, I

after less than two months, accusing the company of using deceptive marketing to promote its own compounded weight loss drugs. The split marks the end of a rocky relationship. As demand surged for weight loss medications like Ozempic and Wagovi, supply shortage opened up the door for companies like HIMS

to prescribe cheaper compounded alternatives, leading to a major stock rally. But that rally faded when the shortage ended and compounding restrictions kicked in. Shares jumped once again though when Novo Nordisk announced that it would begin offering Wigovi through HIMS and HERS to expand access.

A rally which has faded once more, now that the relationship has crumbled. The big issue with HIMS is that we had an agreement that the mass compounding would stop, and unfortunately it didn't stop, a vice president at Nova Nordisk told Bloomberg. But there's two sides to every story, and HIMS and hers fired back saying that there are cases when custom compounded versions are needed for medical reasons.

Regardless of who's right, the market reaction was brutal. Hims and hers shares plunged 34% yesterday, Neil, as investors digested the fallout. What a roller coaster here. They started this partnership in late April, and Novo Nordisk is looking for more people to get on

That is their main objective here, because they are locked in a very intense race with Eli Lilly, who has Manjaro and Zetbound. And they see these telehealth companies like Kim's and hers, and there's a bunch of these out there that have a direct relationship with consumers. And so they looked at these companies and said, wow, if we get our products on their sites, on their marketplaces, perhaps we could convert these people from using compounded versions and maybe we'll brand those versions as

as maybe unsafe because they are not FDA regulated. And maybe we can convert them to Wigovie, to our brand name. That was the idea here. But it's fallen apart as they accuse hims and hers of sort of still selling mass compounded versions, even though the law states that they cancel. We'll see whether this, you know, maybe balloons into more significant legal action. And the

way that hymns and herds is kind of getting around the terms of that partnership is that they are offering compounded shots to a very limited group of patients because they need so-called personalized dosage of the medication. And that is technically allowed under, uh,

FDA rules. So that is why they didn't change their business model as much as Novo Nordisk was. They were trying to have their cake and eat it too, because they were like, we want to still have this revenue stream from selling Axel with Gove. But we also like having our little compounded business on the side. That just didn't sit well with Novo Nordisk, who, by the way, has been going through it since it became the most valuable company in Europe last year. It's fallen about 20%. It just cycled through a CEO. It still hasn't named a successor there. So

Its stock fell about 5% yesterday as well, too. So this wasn't great news because you're right, it did want that extra distribution channel. Right. They lost a sales channel. So analysts expect them to go on the hunt for others like hims and hers. But overall, just a pretty disastrous partnership that shows the precariousness of the compounded weight loss industry right now.

Applying to jobs has always been frustrating and competitive, but in the age of AI, you could be going up against someone who doesn't even exist. AI sludge has taken over the job search, declared the New York Times, and it brought some wild receipts from LinkedIn to back it up. In the past year, the number of applications submitted on LinkedIn has spiked more than 45% to 11,000 applications sent in every single minute.

fueled by generative AI tools, making it less work than ever to apply. Some candidates are using ChatGPT to create a resume containing all the keywords from a job description, and all that takes is a one-sentence prompt. Other, more adventurous types are employing more freewheeling AI agents who will scour the platform for relevant jobs and apply automatically for you. And even others, like North Korean IT criminal networks, are inventing fake avatar people to apply for remote jobs.

And this is a problem that's only getting worse by 2028. One in four job applicants could be completely made up, according to analysis from Gartner. Toby, this is a migraine inducing development for job seekers who are asking, how can I possibly stand out in the sea of applicants? And it's also a huge concern for the people doing the hiring who are asking, how can I possibly sift through the sea of applications to find the right person? The system seems broken.

Yeah, the New York Times article focused on one fully remote role at a tech company that only required three years of experience. And it got an insane amount of applications. After 12 hours, 400 applications had been submitted. By 24 hours, there were 600. And then just a few days later, the number was sitting at 1,200 applications. And the hiring manager was like, I'm three months into this, and I'm still sorting through all these applications. And they all start to look a little bit the same, because if

they are AI powered, which a lot of them are, it becomes this sea of sameness because they're all using the same keywords. They're all using the same prompt. So you know what hiring managers do? They go to AI to help them kind of sort through the deluge of applications they just received, see who is really qualified by probably doing some keyword matching. So right now it's kind of

AI talking to AI in a lot of cases, which is just not a good outcome for anyone involved. Yeah, the solution here seems to be somehow more technology. Chipotle has introduced an AI chatbot screening and schedule tool named, of course, Avocado with a space.

in between them. I don't see how that's relevant to recruiting at all. But they say it's reduced hiring time by 75%. HireVue is another booming platform that conducts AI video interviews. And LinkedIn also is addressing the problem, or at least trying to address the problem, by introducing its own AI agent that can help candidates and recruiters do things like write follow-up messages, conduct screening chats, suggest top applicants, and search for potential hires. So it seems like the only solution here, at least

maybe they're not thinking creatively enough, is layer even more AI onto the system. But you just think that it will hit a breaking point and all this tech will go away and we get back to where we were. Yeah, but maybe the law has something to say about this too because there's this IT professional in North Carolina who said he applied for more than 100 jobs

From 2017 to 2019, he got rejected by every single one of them. And now he's going after those application tracking systems saying that they potentially discriminate against him either for his age or his race. So that puts these sellers of recruiting software on the back foot by saying that, hey, if our algorithms are screening people out unfairly, that might

cause them to use them less. So that is potential, another angle to this AI hiring rush. What if these systems are being discriminatory? It can lead certain people to be shut out from opportunities. Let's take a quick break because we have Toby Strins coming right up.

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Scrolling on X the other day, I came across a post from Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist and one quarter of the popular All In podcast. He asked his 1.8 million followers a simple question, should I launch a SPAC? 50,000 responses later, the answer was a resounding no. And yet Chamath, the self-proclaimed king of SPACs, is ignoring that finding and once again going down the SPAC path, which is what I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends.

A SPAC stands for Special Purpose Acquisition Company, which is a type of vehicle for bringing businesses to the public markets. A SPAC lists on a stock exchange as a shell company that investors can pump money into. And then the idea is to take that capital and find a real business to merge with or acquire. They've existed on U.S. stock markets for over three decades now, but had a heyday during the pandemic with everyone from Virgin Galactic to Coinbase using them to make their public debuts.

Soon, those SPACs were overrun by speculators, pushing shell companies to astronomical valuations that often collapse if or when they eventually merge with a business. But amidst a historically slow IPO market, there is a hint of SPAC mania creeping back into markets.

Along with Chamath teasing a return, Bitcoin evangelist Anthony Pompliano recently raised more than $750 million with brands to create a publicly traded Bitcoin treasury company. And the industry's annual conference was also decidedly more active than in years past as banks and private investors are beginning to reconsider the much maligned asset class. So Neil, all these headlines have me wondering one thing on today's Toby's Trends. Are SPACs back? Back.

They are somewhat back. IPOs of SPACs have raised $11.2 billion so far this year. That is up from $1.8 billion in the same period a year ago. So there's certainly a tick up. We are still far from the heights, the excesses, one might say, of 2021 when $172 billion was raised via SPAC IPOs.

And everyone from A-Rod to Jay-Z was getting in on it. So I think what you're seeing is that there's been a sea change in attitude towards SPACs, and probably that comes straight from the top. It comes from President Trump and this overall deregulation agenda where the SEC is just taking a lot more laissez-faire approach-- thank you, AP Euro-- to the markets, to regulating financial markets. It seems like some of the banks that

have pulled back three years ago over reputational risk and regulatory scrutiny are coming back in or at least tiptoeing back in. Yeah. And probably the best way to see this revival is you go back to mid 2022 when the SPAC

bubble totally burst. And that was when the industry's annual conference I talked about had Stormy Daniels as a headline speaker, where everyone was just kind of like, I don't know if we want to be here anymore. The SPAC industry just got a really negative connotation because a lot of companies did soar up to these

drastically high valuations and then collapsed as soon as a real business came in and inhabited the shell company. But now it looks like a lot of bankers and private investors are going like, hey, actually, I do see this as an easier path towards the public markets, especially with the IPO market just being so clogged up right now. That being said, though, there are a lot of crypto companies that are flooding into the space. The Financial Times talked to one person at the conference that said a lot of people are trying to

become a Bitcoin treasury company like Anthony Pompeo, like Michael Saylor's strategy has done. So that seems to be one of the chief things propelling this SPAC boom, which I don't know if that is necessarily something that reflects well on the industry, again, because these are speculative companies. So it's in a good place right now, but maybe long term, we're just going through another boom and bust cycle. Perhaps. So maybe the biggest symbol that SPACs are

back is that Goldman Sachs is reentering the SPAC business. They're going to start underwriting deals again after three years away. They stepped back in 2022 and they're stepping back in. And as the financial firms are, they have such a, they're sheeple. They have such a herd mentality. If Goldman Sachs does something, then Morgan Stanley and Citi are going to cop back in. So maybe the floodgates are open. Say that five times fast.

Goldman Sachs is bringing SPACs back. There we go. Okay, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Two things that are extremely hot right now, New York and nuclear power, are teaming up in what could be a potentially historic partnership. Yesterday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul told the Wall Street Journal that she directed the public utility to build a large nuclear power facility upstate.

which would be the first new U.S. nuclear plant in more than 15 years. It's intended to produce at least one gigawatt of new nuclear power generation, which is enough to power about one million homes. She said, I'm going to lean into making sure that every company that wants to come to New York and everyone who wants to live here will have to never worry about reliability and affordability when it comes to their utility costs. Nuclear power is having a renaissance after decades of disinvestment and plant retirements.

mainly thanks to the surge in electricity demands from AI data centers. New York wants to be the Florence. Yeah, Kathy Hochul has made this a priority since she became governor. She's had a conversation with Trump that led to him lifting a stop work order on this big offshore wind project. So that was a big win for her. And this all actually traces back to the closure of

of another nuclear power plant that was 40 miles upriver from Manhattan, the India Point Nuclear Plant. When that was closed, that was 25% of all the electricity needs for New York City, poof, gone, just like that. So in its absence, fossil fuels have stepped in to make up the difference. So Kathy Hochul has obviously made this a priority. She wants to bring nuclear back to New York City because of what was lost just a few years ago.

Zillow has a database of 160 million properties, but it wants more, much to the annoyance of industry competitors. In a suit filed in New York federal court yesterday, the real estate brokerage Compass claimed that Zillow was trying to maintain an illegal monopoly over online home listings.

In an effort to pull some views away from Zillow, which gets about 227 million unique visitors a month, Compass launched a program called Private Exclusives, which features about 7,000 listings available only to Compass agents and buyers. But Zillow didn't like that and in April announced that any home that was put up for sale but not available on Zillow within 24 hours would be permanently banned from the site. Now Compass is pushing back on what it sees as anti-competitive practices

aka the Zillow ban. Neil, this is contentious because Compass thinks that no one company should have so much power over the real estate market, but Zillow doesn't think that any company should hoard listings either. It's contentious also because the online real estate listing space is pretty much all

that exists now in helping people find a home. Basically, nearly 100% of buyers report now they use the internet in their home searches. So any company that controls that marketplace will be the destination that people go to. Right now, it's Zillow. Compass wants to carve out a niche for itself. And Zillow says, you can't do that. That's not good for consumers. We want every listing available to be on

our platform specifically, Compass says, no, actually we are creating more choice by providing an alternative to Zillow. So this turf war is heating up. It's not going away.

How much money do you need to live comfortably? The answer is increasingly six figures and above, according to Bankrains Financial Freedom Survey. Nearly half of all adults polled said that they would need to make over $100,000 to feel financially secure. And 26% said that $150,000 was their magic number. And some people who probably have kids or an extensive Labubu collection put the bar at over $200,000.

How far away is perception from reality? The median household income in 2023 was just over $80,000. A recent period of inflation and economic uncertainty have chipped away at a lot of people's buying power. So it is no surprise that these answers are reaching well into the six figures. Inflation has been fascinating.

brutal. Imagine you're in January 2020 and you had a $100,000 salary that has the same buying power in April 2025 as a salary of $124,000. So if you haven't gotten a raise since 2020 because of inflation, you've essentially lost $24,000 of your salary. So it's not a surprise that people

want a raise and they don't feel financially comfortable. Actually, the share of Americans who say they do not feel financially comfortable was up to 77% in 2025, which is an increase from 75% in 2024 and 72% in 2023. Meanwhile, inflation has decreased from 9% back then to 2% now. So there's still lingering memories of inflation. It's not like prices have gone down. They're still going up at just a smaller rate. So you can understand that people are feeling a little, uh,

a little antsy about their finances. And maybe this is a, maybe this is a little license to go out and ask for that raise today. Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday. If you have any thoughts on today's episode, send an email with questions, comments, or feedback to morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Liu is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and Makeup said it wasn't worth touching us up today because we just sweated off.

Devin Emery is our president, and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show, Danielle. Let's run it back tomorrow. It's smart to always have a few financial goals. And a really smart one you can set? Earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover, you can. Get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show. See terms at discover.com slash credit card.