Mortgage Rates Hit Highest Level in 2 Years, Meta Tests ‘Human Concierge’ for Muse

Public.com presents the rundown, your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zayda Admani and today is Wednesday's, September 23rd. In today's episode, we'll break down why mortgage rates are back above 7%, and why some home buyers are turning to risk your adjustable rate mortgages. We'll also tell you why Meta's new AI agent might have secretly had a human making phone calls for you. Let's stick around to the end of the show to find out why Apple might owe you some money because of Siri. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Yesterday was another interesting day for the stock market. The S&P 500 was literally flat on the day, technically down 600s of a point. Meanwhile, the NASDAQ did squeeze out a 0.5% gain for another record close. And once again, AI was driving a lot of the action, not just the winners, but also the losers. The financial sector was the worst performing sector in the S&P yesterday, dropping 2%, some big names like Charles Schwab fell 6%, while JP Morgan and Bank of America fell 3%. And the reason for that is AI. The fear now is that AI agents like Meta's Muse could disrupt everything from wealth management and insurance to payments and banking. Yesterday, I mentioned that people were using Meta Muse to find cheaper car insurance, while Meta is leaning into that. The Meta team is promoting something called the Muse Money Challenge, telling people to have Muse hunt for savings on their streaming services and car insurance and gym membership. So from the future, we live in a world where personal AI agents are constantly moving your money around and comparing financial products and making sure every dollar is optimized, that could mean fewer fees for advisors and financial firms. So the market is starting to ask these questions now and trying to figure out which business model might get disrupted from personal AI agents. And this is what the market does, right? At the start of the year, the market.software companies were coked because of AI and vibe coding, and now it seems like the market things other sectors could be disrupted by AI like financials. I personally don't think that banks are going to be that impacted, but I guess we'll see. Now, assuming out, we continue to get some relief on the macro side of things, oil prices fell for the 5th straight session on Tuesday, WTI crude closed at $94 a barrel and brand finished just under $100 a barrel. On top of that, Saudi Arabia also restarted their East West pipeline, which gives the country another route to move oil around the straight of Hormuz. Although Reuters did report that getting the pipeline completely back up to full capacity could take several weeks. But yeah, the drop in oil prices is obviously good news for inflation, but the bond market is still cautious here, the 10 year treasury yield finished Tuesday at 4.966%, basically sitting right below the 5% level we've been talking about. So we'll continue to keep an eye on the bond market along with oil and stocks and everything else happening. So don't forget to subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already and tune in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines starting with mortgage rates. The average rate on a 30 year fixed mortgage in the US has jumped to 7.12% as of last week, this is according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association. That is the highest mortgage rate since May of 2024. And this is why we keep talking about the bond market so much lately. Mortgage rates track long term treasury yields, especially the 10 year. And as those yields have climbed over the last few months because investors are worried about inflation, government borrowing, and obviously higher oil prices from the Iran War, mortgage rates have also risen as well. Mortgage rates now are a full percentage point higher since the Iran War began back in February. And you know, higher mortgage rates reduces purchasing power for home buyers. Like for example, if you're trying to buy a house and your monthly mortgage budget is $2,500 a month, that means that you can buy a house for around $300,000 assuming a 20% down payment with rates at 7%. But when rates were at 6%, you could have bought a house up to $325,000. So higher rates are just crushing demand. I mean, the housing market was already frozen, but it just continues to get worse. Mortgage applications to buy a home are now 11% lower than they were a year ago. But you know, here's a stat that really stood out to me. Almost 10% of mortgage applicants are now choosing adjustable rate mortgages or ARMs. And I can see why a home buyer would do that right now, because an ARM gives you a lower rate for the first few years. Right now, it's around 6.1%, which is more than a full percentage point lower than a fixed loan. Now, these ARMs do reset to whatever rates are at the time in five to six years. So basically, these buyers that are choosing an ARM are betting that rates will be lower in the future than they are today. And honestly, I don't think that's a bad bet, but what is notable is that when almost one in 10 borrowers are willing to take on future interest rate risk just to make the payments work today, that just tells you how brutal housing affordability has become. So yeah, the housing market just continues to be so weird that it's completely frozen right now. Mortgage rates are above 7%, yet prices aren't coming down meaningfully. I mean, you would think that something has to give at this point, but it's been like this for the last two to three years now. Let's shift gears and talk about meta, because we have a quick update about mues from yesterday. On yesterday's show, I talked about how meta's new AI app called mues has seen a huge surge in popularity, which has led to a big surge in meta stock price. Well, it turns out that mues might not just be AI. There was a report from Reuters that said that meta has been testing what it calls a human concierge where human contractors have quietly been handling some of the calls placed through mues. The features of mues is that it can have an AI do phone calls for you. Well, it turns out that it's not always an AI doing the work. Now, the reason that meta was getting some humans involved is that people kept hanging up on the AI. One meta employee said that he tried calling his insurance company through mues, and they kept hanging up on the mues AI. And this is exactly why I haven't used these AI agents to make phone calls on my behalf. Now, I personally hate getting robo calls, so I don't want to be sending my own robo calls to businesses to schedule a haircut, you know? Now, I'll be honest, I use AI to write up emails to handle disputes or refunds and stuff like that, but I'm not using AI to make phone calls for me, okay? And you know, with meta potentially using humans in the back end, that obviously raises some privacy concerns as well. Employees inside meta have raised questions about sensitive information potentially being passed to these human contractors. For now, meta has rolled back the features while they figure out safeguards and proper disclosures. We gotta say, though, there's still a ton of hype around mues and companies are lining up to work with it. For example, Instacart announced that mues will connect directly to their grocery platform, which caused Instacart stock to jump more than 3% this morning. This whole episode right now kind of reminds me of like the ChatGPT plugins from last year. You know, every company that was announcing a plugin with ChatGPT's other stocks shoot up in the short term because of all the hype. But looking back on it, we now know that that didn't really lead to anything. So I wonder if the same thing will happen with mues. Anyways, I'm sure we'll learn more about Meta's AI plans and an update on mues tonight. The Meta Connect conference kicks off today and Mark Zuckerberg is giving the keynote at 7 p.m. Eastern. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of the Quantum Company Ionic are ripping hires this morning up more than 10% and it's dragging the whole sector up with it. Nick announced a major technical milestone. The company said they successfully tested what it calls the industry's first end-to-end real-time quantum error correction decoder that can run on a single normal CPU. Now, if you didn't understand what I just said, I don't blame you, I had to look up what all that meant. Essentially, quantum computers are really powerful, right? But one of the biggest problems with them is that they constantly make errors. So if we're ever going to have quantum computers be very useful at scale, we need to be able to catch and correct these errors basically in real time without slowing everything down. So what Ionic said is they've built an auto correct for quantum computers, which could be a huge deal. And that's why quantum stocks across the board are surging, regetti, and d-wave are up more than 5% this morning as well. Now, quantum has kind of lost a lot of its height that it had earlier. All these quantum stocks that I just mentioned are down more than 50% from their 52-week highs. So who knows, maybe this will spark a rally in the short term. Now, on the flip side, shares of KB homes are falling despite reporting better than expected earnings. The home builder earned $1.05 a share versus the 89 cents a share that Wall Street was expecting, and their gross margins also came in better than expected at 16.5%. The problem for the company though was guidance. The company cut their full-year margin forecast, and they're also expecting fewer deliveries than what Wall Street was looking for. Management is blaming mortgage rates being around 7%, making buyers more cautious, especially in Southern California. Not to mention, existing home inventories are now at its highest level in a decade, and KB says that prices are starting to fall in more of its markets. So even though KB executed pretty well last quarter, the housing market itself is still making life very difficult for home builders, and that's why their stock is down around 3% this morning at the time of this recording. And if you zoom out, shares of KB are down 15% on the year. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Apple is paying iPhone owners $250 million because of how bad Siri and Apple intelligence were over the last couple years. A quick backstory here, there was a class-action lawsuit filed against Apple in the US for misleading consumers about Apple intelligence. If you guys remember, the iPhone 16 was sold as built for Apple intelligence, except a bunch of Apple's AI features Apple had shown off in their commercials like Smarter Siri, we're going to be doing a lot of work. weren't actually available when the phone launched. In fact, the new Smarter Series just rolled out with iOS 27, and honestly, it's still not that great. But yeah, because of Apple misleading consumers, they agreed to settle the class action lawsuit for $250 million, and now people can actually file the claim. If you bought an iPhone 15 Pro Max or any iPhone 16 model in the US between June 10th, 2024, and March 29th, 2025, you could be eligible. And by the way, this isn't one of those class action lawsuits where you get a check in the mail for like $1.50. The estimate is about $25 per phone, and it could go as high as $95 per phone, depending on how many people file. The more people that file, the less payout is going to be. So maybe I'm making a mistake telling you guys in the podcast, but you know what? I want you guys to get paid by Apple. The deadline to file is December 21st, and if you just Google Apple Series settlement, you should see the link to file to claim. I usually don't file these class action claims, but I think for this one, I'm gonna do it. Well, actually, I'll probably just have Meta Muse just take care of it for me. There's like some sort of like poetic irony that I'm gonna use AI to file the claims for me. I'm not sure if Ironic is the right word, but you guys know what I mean. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. I hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Thank you guys so much for listening, watching, and commenting. Shout out to Mike and V for all the work behind the scenes. And we'll see you guys back here tomorrow. When you shop, Kroger Delivery, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries delivered right to your door. Our refrigerated trucks keep your items fresh while our associates are committed to getting every detail right, carefully selecting and packing your order with care, because bringing you fresh quality groceries is what we do best. And right now, enjoy $20 off your first online order of $75 or more. Restrictions apply, see site for details. Kroger, fresh for everyone. For a limited time, you can get a big Mac meal for just $8. That's a burger, fries, and a drink. They don't call it an extra value meal for nothing. Get a big Mac meal only at McDonald's. Pricing participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.