Morning Brew Daily - Wells Fargo Can Grow Again & Google Sounds Alarm on Salesforce Hackers

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

Episode 598: Neal and Toby discuss Wells Fargo’s asset cap being lifted after it spent years overhauling its regulatory policies due to abusive tactics against customers. Then, automakers are scramb...ling to find workaround after China halts rare earth magnets essential to car production. Plus, a Google report finds hackers posing as IT workers have gained access to Salesforce data for extortion purposes. Meanwhile, Neal shares his favorite numbers on Scottsdale, AZ, cannabis among the elderly, and the loneliest paint of 2025.  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. LinkedIn will even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign so you can try it yourself. Go to LinkedIn.com/MBD  Terms and conditions apply. Only on LinkedIn Ads. 00:00 - Nintendo Switch Release 03:00 - Wells Fargo Cap Lifted  07:45 - Cars and Rare Earth Minerals 11:50 - Hacking Warning from Google  16:15 - Neal’s Numbers 24:00 - Headlines Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:29 Good morning, Brew, Daily. show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, after seven years of sleeping in the garage, Wells Fargo gets invited back into the house. Then hackers have been using a sophisticated voice fishing operation to steal customer data from retail companies. It's Thursday, June 5th. Let's ride. Happy Switch to Release Day. Nintendo's highly anticipated follow-up to its best-selling Switch console, hit websites and stores around the world at midnight. And if you do not have one in your hands right now, you might be out of luck. Walmart, GameStop, and BJs have apparently sold out of their inventory, at least online, but they and targets say they'll have
Starting point is 00:01:14 limited stock in physical stores. Over in Japan, the frenzy is even bigger. About 2.2 million people in that country alone entered a lottery system to secure a pre-order, and that was after imposing rules like you needed to log 50 hours of gameplay on the switch to even participate. Toby, find someone who looks like you the way Nintendo fans look at the Switch too. They are coming out in droves for this thing. A Verge Rider who lives in a town with a population of just 65,000 people documented in his experience waiting in line to get his Nintendo Switch. And he said his local Best Buy had a line 400 people deep before the Switch even came out. That is some crazy demand.
Starting point is 00:01:55 Nintendo expects to sell 15 million units in one year, but you might want to take the over on that. It's great news for electronics retailers, too, like BJs, like Walmart, like Best Buy. It's their Super Bowl. They're having all these people come out in droves if the Super Bowl only happened once every eight years. And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn ads. All right, Neil QuizTime. What's the difference between an ad that gets ignored and one that drives results? Better creative?
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Starting point is 00:03:32 After more than seven years on the Federal Reserve's Noddy List, Wells Fargo is finally free. Starting this week, the Fed lifted its asset restrictions on the bank, ending a rare and long-running penalty that had stunted its ability to expand and cost the bank an estimated $39 billion in profits. This saga dates back to 2015 when Wells Fargo was the best. of the banking world. Its rise to become the country's most viable bank was fueled by a high pressure sales culture where compensation was tied to revenue goals. But aggressive sales targets ultimately incentivized employees to open around 3.5 million fake or unauthorized customer
Starting point is 00:04:10 accounts from 2009 to 2016. What followed was an unprecedented tidal wave of regulatory crackdowns. The harshest being the Fed-imposed asset cap that barred the bank from growing its balance sheet beyond $2 trillion until it was able to clean up its act. It took a while, but Wells Fargo has gotten its act together under a new CEO, Charlie Sharp, earning the Fed's blessing to get back to business
Starting point is 00:04:34 as usual. That means the now fourth largest bank in the country can freely take deposits, make more loans, and look into acquiring companies once more. This has been a long comeback for Wells Fargo that has involved rebuilding its tarnished reputation and fixing deep-rooted cultural
Starting point is 00:04:50 issues at the bank. Now we'll see if it has any gas left in the tank after years of being stuck in neutral because it sure has a lot of ground to make up. I mean, observers say this was the harshest penalty ever doled out on Wall Street capping your growth. And it really did cap Wells Fargo's growth because over the years when it was under this penalty, banks grew immensely. Average annual deposits at U.S. banks grew by more than a third from 2019 through 2024. Meanwhile, Wells' average annual deposits because it couldn't grow them, we're just up 5% over that same time frame. Remember, this was when the Fed issued unprecedented amount of stimulus during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was the 2023 regional
Starting point is 00:05:34 banking crisis when a several smaller mid-sized banks went under and J.P. Morgan and the bigger banks were there to swoop in more deposits. Wells Fargo missed out on all of that. And now it is far behind. It's trading revenue investment banking fees last year. We're about the same as what JP Morgan earned from those same businesses in just the fourth quarter alone. So it's got some catching up to do, but it does seem like in a prime position to be now one of the more profitable banks on Wall Street now that it has its ducks in order. I do just want to go back to when this punishment was handed down. An analyst at Piper Sandler said it was almost like a ghost story you would tell children to scare them, but not something you'd actually see in practice. This asset cap was just a
Starting point is 00:06:14 very scary thing. And initially, actually, it was thought to be maybe this quick undertaking where Wells Fargo to get its act back in order relatively quickly. And actually, after the punishment was handed down, some analysts actually upgraded the stock because they thought it would be done and dusted within the year. It drew on much longer than that. More and more things started coming out about how rotten the Wells Fargo culture was. They got hit with a $1.7 billion fine from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well for how they were handling mortgage and auto loan.
Starting point is 00:06:48 So it was just this whole thing where they needed to switch the culture out, stop incentivizing these employees to fabricate these customer accounts and just get back to becoming a bank that people could trust once more. And so it's taken seven long years, but they're finally back to the point where they feel like they can reset and start growing their business again. And the prognosis looks pretty good if you listen to Jamie Diamond, who's the JP Morgan CEO. He actually handpick the Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Sharp out of college to be his protege.
Starting point is 00:07:21 He worked with Diamond to build what is now the modern JP Morgan, the biggest bank in the world. Charlie Sharp then went to Vizzo where he doubled that stock price in four years. Then he went to BNY Mellon, and then he went to Wells Fargo for this cleanup job. So he is going, he has been in the background perhaps of Wall Street CEOs just because he's been mopping the floors for seven years. Now he's ready to hit the stage. He's 60. And Jamie Diamond said, I'm very bullish on Wells Fargo. This is not only good for Wells Fargo, but for the industry overall. But you have the thing in the back of his mind, he's saying, well, we have a serious competitor now to deal with. Yeah, I do think that the biggest thing that Wells Fargo can do now to get back on its feet is cut down some cost. The bank had hired 10,000 employees across its risk and control groups to try to address some of these regulatory issues. So last year, it spent $2.5 billion. more on those groups than compared to 2018. So they can finally trim that headcount down.
Starting point is 00:08:19 They don't need so many people working on these regulatory issues and they can actually start making money for the business instead. Moving on, honk if you need rare earth minerals, global automakers are leaning on their horns to get anyone to pay attention to an impending crisis. They're going to have to pause production at plants in the coming days and weeks because they're running out of the magnets made by rare earth minerals necessary to make cars.
Starting point is 00:08:42 This impending manufacturing catastrophe began back in April when China halted exports of rare earth magnets, a key input for literally every piece of advanced electronics in the world, cars, planes, cell phones, robots, data centers, weapons. If it has a motor generator or sensor, it requires a magnet made by rare earth minerals. The problem is that China has a stranglehold on these components, controlling more than 90% of the market, and the Chinese stopped shipping those internationally two months ago, reportedly in retaliation for Trump's tariffs. Now, company's stockpiles are dwindling and without new supply, they say they're going to have to shut down factories imminently. The rare earth shortage would be most devastating to the auto sector, the largest buyer of these magnets. Without the
Starting point is 00:09:27 magnets, they simply can't make cars and would have to send workers home and turn the lights off. It's already happening. Last week, Ford temporarily closed its Ford Explorer SUV factory near Chicago due to a lack of magnets. Toby, Shades of the 20th. 2021 chip shortage here that devastated auto production. Are there any workarounds? Yeah, the workaround here is you need rare earth. China is not sending you them. So what do you do? You go and set up manufacturing for auto parts in China. You start building your engines over in China, which is diametrically opposed to, you know, the Trump administration's goal of reshoring American manufacturing. But when you have such a critical component of the supply chain being kind of constricted
Starting point is 00:10:11 by China, you're going to have to get creative with it. So one option is you literally just start building engines over there. Another option, which is just a horrible option, is you partially finish an engine, send the whole engine over to China, have just a dime or nickel-sized rare earth magnet installed, and then send that back to the U.S., which, again, is not cost-effective, not efficient whatsoever. So these workarounds are pretty much working very much against the U.S. administration's goals of trying to bolster auto manufacturing inside our borders.
Starting point is 00:10:43 And it's just incredible what these magnets go into. It's literally everything. There are as many as 12 magnets in a single luxury car seat. They're also into high-end speaker systems. So it's potentially, you know, auto makers could just say, okay, well, we can't make, you know, souped up cars anymore. You're not getting adjustable seats. You're getting downgraded speakers because we just simply can't make these cars
Starting point is 00:11:06 with the necessary requirements because we don't have, magnets. So they are pleading. And it's not just the United States automakers. European automakers have also had to aisle factories over the past few weeks because China's halted these shipments, not just the United States, but all around the world. So they are pleading with China to open up these shipments back. But it just goes to show how incredible a hand China has in this trade war. Because, I mean, there's nothing more powerful than holding these magnets because they are the entire world's Achilles heel without them. You can't make a single. piece of advanced electronics. Yeah, and that's maybe what will happen is that you'll start
Starting point is 00:11:43 downgrading your electronics. One option is to revert back to older electric vehicle motor technology, which is less efficient and less cost effective, but doesn't rely as much on rare earth magnet. So that's not a great solution. And the other solution is just produce more gas-powered cars, which also necessarily isn't great for companies who have fuel economy standards to try to meet emissions standards to try to meet. So they are between a rock, a hard place, and a rare earth mineral, and right now China does hold all the cards. Google's threat intelligence group is sort of like an IT department for the whole internet, and it just issued a warning telling companies to be on the lookout for a sophisticated
Starting point is 00:12:19 hack hitting 20 businesses across the U.S. and UK in recent weeks. A hacking group has been impersonating IT personnel in tricking people into revealing login info or installing a copycat malicious version of a Salesforce tool. So far, the network has attacked 20 companies, mostly by, calling up employees pretending to be their friends over at IT support and nicking some sensitive credentials in the process. Google's report didn't name specific companies, but it follows a rassar reports from Adidas, Victoria's Secret, Cartier, and North Face that they've been facing cyber attacks in recent
Starting point is 00:12:54 weeks. Now, if you're a frequent Salesforce tool user, don't be alarmed. The issue isn't tied to any inherent vulnerability in its software. It's more tied to inherent vulnerabilities in humanity software as the hackers have relied on voice fishing campaigns and social engineering to gain access to customer info. So, Neil, Google has put out the bat signal here to remain vigilant as these hacks keep coming and they don't stop coming. I mean, these retailers are taking a massive hit from these hacks.
Starting point is 00:13:22 Marks and Spencer, which is a UK retailer, expects to lose $400 million in operating profit because it can't sell anything online. It's been going on for weeks and it doesn't expect its e-commerce site to get back up until July. So that whole area of its business is just completely offline. Victoria's secret website had been offline for multiple days. It just got it up recently, but it just lost millions of dollars in sales. Retailers are kind of a sitting duck in the cybersecurity space.
Starting point is 00:13:50 They are very ripe for hacking. They're going to target any industry with high transaction volumes, which retailers have. They have tight margins as well. So they're not going to maybe invest in cybersecurity the way other companies would. and they just have tons of customer information because what do you do every single time you buy something? You type in all of your personal information so they can send it to you and you give them your credit card information.
Starting point is 00:14:13 So retailers are just kind of sitting there ripe for hacking. And Google's putting out this call saying stay vigilant. Yeah. The damage is already done. And the issue here, too, is that it's not easy to get these hackers out of the system once they've gained access through legitimate credentials. And so you are seeing companies literally turning things off and turning them back on.
Starting point is 00:14:34 like Victoria's Secret, who had to take their website down because you can't necessarily fix things. You have to stop attackers from getting deeper into your network. So you oftentimes do just shut down and totally delete systems, basically, to reset and build them back up. So, yeah, it is a massive headache because hackers are not easy to get rid of once they've wormed their way into your business. Up next, we got news numbers.
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Starting point is 00:15:59 Exclusions apply for licenses. see home depot.com slash license numbers. Welcome to Neal's numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will have you going, well, actually, to your friends all weekend. My first number is the fastest growing millionaire hub in the country. Think you know what city it is? Scottsdale, Arizona. According to a new report by Henley and Partners, the Bachelor Party Capital of the United States is also home to the fastest growing millionaire population of any American city,
Starting point is 00:16:28 with its population of high net worth individuals growing by 125% between 2014 and 2024. The desert city near Phoenix has gained thousands of new millionaires thanks in part to the growth of the tech industry in the region. GoDaddy and Carvana are headquartered in the area, and Intel and TSM have growing presences. Scottsdale also has leisure amenities loved by wealthy retirees like sunny weather, an infinite number of places to get plastered, resorts, and elite golf courses. But perhaps just as interesting as Scottsdale topping the list is noting which city was replaced Austin, Texas. Last year, Austin was named the fastest growing millionaire hub in the country. However, it's not even in the top five this year.
Starting point is 00:17:11 Texas's capital boomed during the pandemic as a number of tech companies opened up offices there, but it's lost some of its luster due to the tech slowdown and more competition from places like Scottsdale and Tampa. You can see this playing out in the luxury home market during the time period studied in the report, about one in four homes in Austin was listed for $1 million or more compared to the more than 50% of properties listed for $1 million or more in Scottsdale. Toby, a Phoenix suburb is rising. It is rising right now. And it does have a lot of millionaire residents, 14,800 by Henley and Partners estimation, which
Starting point is 00:17:49 is solid. That's more than West Palm Beach, which was second place over the last decade with 112% growth in high net worth individuals. But then if you just zoom out and you look at like the true concentrations to where millionaires actually live, you look at the Bay Area, which came in at number three on the list, which is so impressive because that the Bay Area has 342,000 millionaires who live there, 82 billionaires, 756 centi millionaires as well. So just in terms of the scale, that's a lot of Scottsdale's worth of millionaires that are living in the Bay Area. It is. This report measured the fastest growing ones. And Scottsdale is truly rising. What is not rising besides.
Starting point is 00:18:27 Austin, Texas is Connecticut. Poor Connecticut, Greenwich and Dary, and they were on these lists for many, many years, but they've been, they've completely dropped off the list entirely. And that's because people are just going to Florida. West Palm Beach was the second fastest growing one. Miami was number four. So you're seeing this exodus of richer people from Greenwich and Darian down to the east coast of Florida and the desert of Arizona. My next number may explain why visits to your nana increasingly include ripping a bong. U.S. marijuana use among people aged 65 or older surge nearly 46% from 2021 to 2023, according to a new study in JAMA internal medicine. 7% of older Americans say they used cannabis in the past month compared to 5.2% in 2022,
Starting point is 00:19:16 4.8% in 2021, and less than 1% in the mid-2000s. The upswing can probably be explained by cannabis being legalized in more states, as well as the social stigma wearing off for taking cannabis to deal with chronic pain, stress, or other conditions afflicting America's seniors. Health experts are warning this increased use comes with risk. After all, there's a lot more THC in cannabis nowadays than when boomers were toking up at Woodstock as teenagers decades ago. And in editors note accompanying the study, three geriatricians wrote that cannabis can complicate the management of chronic diseases, interfere with other drugs people are taking, and impair the senses and cause accidents. So more research into the benefits
Starting point is 00:19:55 and risks are needed. But one thing's clear, Toby, Pot is just not for the youth anymore. It's not just for the youth. It's increasingly for older, richer women, specifically, too, because the increase was more pronounced among women than men and was also more pronounced among adults with annual incomes over $75,000.
Starting point is 00:20:15 So it does really look like that stigma factor has totally changed. And now, you know, these older women are just kind of sitting on their porch and smoking some weed, whether medicinally, or recreationally, it is not just for the youth as well, because there was this other survey that found that cannabis use in the U.S. has been increasing, but not actually amongst teenagers. This research looked at data on more than 500,000 people's cannabis habits during different time periods from 2013 to 2022. And teenagers was flat while everybody else's cannabis use was growing as well. So it is this fascinating thing where it is making its way upwards in the age ranks
Starting point is 00:20:51 and staying the same or even dwindling amongst the youths. final number is a listener's submission from Valeria. So you have her to thank for this one. And she alerted us to the fact that Sherwin Williams, the paint company, has begun to spotlight its loneliest hue of the year, meaning the hues that were the least popular among customers. For 2025, that hue was Radiant Lilac SW 0774. Despite being a rich inviting purple, radiant lilac had the fewest gallons sold of any hue in the Sherwin Williams portfolio last year. Out of the millions of paint gallons the company tints per year, there were less than 1,000 gallons of radiant lilac made. Design experts say it's probably because homeowners are a cautious bunch and purple is a bold choice that's hard to pull off.
Starting point is 00:21:36 Like if you do purple wrong, people may never come over your house again. Still, the folks at Sherwin Williams think Radiant Lilac shouldn't scare you off if you are thoughtful about it. This hue works really well if you're going for a 70s retro vibe paired with olive and mustard yellows and walnut wood tones. Radiant lilac would also shine in design styles ranging from Arcdeco, mid-century modern, Scandinavian, and bold minimalism. Toby, I really like this marketing initiative. It's smart to highlight the ugly duckling, but explain why it's been overlooked. Yeah, I don't like this color at all. I love it. A lot of designers kind of, once this press release came out, started saying how they would use it. And some of them said, Radiant Lilac is terminally outdated. Obviously, it's very intimidating, too, to try to put this outdated color in multiple places. Also,
Starting point is 00:22:23 just not trendy at all right now. These kind of pastel shades are very much out. There's very much more of a focus on these natural organic tones, you know, deeper greens, deeper browns, and etc. And radiant lilac just doesn't fit at all with that. The other color story that we've talked about on the show before, though, is Pantone names a color of the year each year. And this year, it's peach fuzz. And so I started looking at color theory. And peach fuzz and radiant lilac actually pair quite well together. They're both sort of muted. Their low saturation levels, help them blend without clashing.
Starting point is 00:22:58 Also, it's a nice warm and cool balance. So you can take the most popular color of the year and the least popular color of the year and actually make some magic out of that. And I kind of like that that is the case here. I'd probably need to call up a professional because those two together. Oh, my God, it would be a disaster. Okay, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. The hits keep coming to President Trump's big, beautiful bill.
Starting point is 00:23:19 the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office calculated that the massive tax cuts and spending package would add $2.4 trillion to U.S. debt by 2034, giving more ammo to critics like Elon Musk, who say the bill would bankrupt the country for future generations. Specifically, the bean counters at the CBO found that the bill would cut spending by $1.3 trillion in the coming decade, but reduced tax revenues far more than that, $3.75 trillion. It would also cause the number of people without health insurance to rise by 10.9 million from cuts to Medicaid. The new figures may dim the bill's chances in the Senate where it can't lose many Republican votes, but some GOP lawmakers already say they're voting against it, with Senator Ron Johnson yesterday calling the bill immoral and grotesque and demanding
Starting point is 00:24:06 changes. Yeah, the Trump administration has kind of repeatedly dismissed this CBO estimates. They're saying it's inaccurate because they're saying it doesn't account for any boosts to the economy that the bill might create through these tax cuts, which could offset some of those revenue losses. I mean, Treasury Secretary Scott Bassett said last month, I'm not worried about the U.S. debt dynamics because a swelling GDP will ease the burden. So he's projecting higher growth can help offset some of these things. But yeah, this bill narrowly passed the House last month. It now faces a lot of opposition in the Senate. It's probably going to look like a totally different bill by the time it gets out there. But the CBO is one other data point that critics can
Starting point is 00:24:46 and say, hey, this is going to increase our debt too much. We don't necessarily want this. We don't want to do more for deficit reduction. We don't want to add to the deficit. President Trump also announced a travel ban on 12 countries yesterday and a partial ban on seven others saying it was necessary to bolster national security and combat terrorism. The ban will fully restrict citizens from the likes of Afghanistan, Haiti, Iran, and
Starting point is 00:25:10 other mainly African nations, while Cuba, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, and others will have a partial restriction. The White House says that the country is targeted by the ban either have high visa overstay rates or don't adequately vet or share security information about their citizens when traveling to the U.S. The proclamation won't apply to current visa holders, lawful permanent residents, or travelers come to the U.S. for the upcoming World Cup or Olympics. The organizers have grown increasingly uneasy about Trump's immigration policies. Neil, this is likely to face legal challenges, just as a similar order did from his first term. But until then, the travel ban is set to go into effect on Monday the 9th. This is a little different than the last time they did this.
Starting point is 00:25:53 Seems like they have their legal ducks. A little more in order. They Trump, one week into office, ordered this travel ban from majority Muslim countries. And it was, remember, it was chaos at the airports. No one knew what was going on because it was implemented so hastily. That went through years of litigation, the Supreme Court upheld the legality once the Trump administration provided justification for it. It looks like they're taking their time and getting their legal ducks in a row so that it will survive more legal challenges here. Of course, human rights advocates are still upset about this, especially from places like Sudan, which is engulfed in a civil war. And you have people who are leading Sudanese human rights organizations saying it was just another
Starting point is 00:26:35 indication of the Trump administration being inconsiderate to the suffering of those people. So yes, it may face legal challenges, but it's not like the first time with all of that travel chaos we saw at airports and other ports of entry for the United States. Finally, imagine getting an evacuation notice because authorities found World War II bombs in your neighborhood. Well, that was the reality for residents of Cologne, Germany yesterday, when more than 20,000 people were evacuated from part of the city. so that specialists could come in and diffuse three unexploded U.S. bombs from World War II they discovered earlier this week.
Starting point is 00:27:12 It's not particularly rare to find World War II bombs in cities around Germany 80 years after the war ended, but an evacuation of this scale was the largest since 1945. The city basically had a snow day since the Evac area contained 58 hotels, nine schools, a couple of museums, and office buildings. The good news is that the three bombs were successfully diffused. That is the good news, but the bad news is that more than a dozen couples that were scheduled to have their wedding at Cologne City Hall had to relocate their ceremonies. Can you imagine you plan for this big old day and then they find unexploded World War II bombs and you have to reschedule everything? It's a good story.
Starting point is 00:27:51 It is a good story, but that sounds like a nightmare right there. I didn't realize how prevalent this was. 1,500 to 2,000 unexploded World War II bombs are found every year in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, which is where Cologne is. is located. So this is not an unusual occurrence by any means. It is unusual occurrence to have them just so close to a city center in a population center like Cologne. So very tough story for your wedding guests, though, to say like, sorry guys, this wedding is literally off to a bad start because some bombs were found. All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Thursday. Give any thoughts on today's
Starting point is 00:28:28 episode, send an email with questions, comments, or feedback to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Lue is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup is standing in line at GameStop. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew.
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