Skip the waitlist and invest in blue-chip art for the very first time by signing up for Masterworks: https://masterworks.art/modernmba Purchase shares in masterpieces from artists like Pablo Picasso, Banksy, Andy Warhol, and more. How Masterworks works: - Create your account with your traditional bank account - Pick major works of art to invest in or our new blue-chip diversified art portfolio - Invest, hold shares in works or trade them in our secondary marketplace See important Masterworks disclosures: https://www.masterworks.io/about/disclaimer 💬 Join the Modern MBA community - https://www.reddit.com/r/modernmba/ ☕️ Support Modern MBA on Patreon and unlock bonuses like additional content, exclusive essays, and regular Q&A: https://patreon.com/modernmba Affirm, Klarna, and Afterpay - in just 5 years, these 3 companies have popularized a new form of consumer spending called Buy Now Pay Later. BNPL is a type of short-term unsecured personal loan where instead of paying the full price upfront at checkout, you can defer the cost of any item by splitting the payment into smaller installments over time. If you want to spread payments out over a longer period of time to make the installments even smaller, you’ll have to pay interest. And if you miss a payment using BNPL, there are penalties with late fees, collections, and lowered credit score. What Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay have done is they’ve broadened the purpose of short-term unsecured personal loans from large one-time essentials into everyday, impulse, and splurge purchases. They’ve made it easy for anyone to borrow money, simplifying a historically opaque, time-consuming process of applications and manual underwriting into a scalable UX that provides instant credit in just a few taps. Most of all, there’s instant gratification. With Affirm, Klarna, or Afterpay, you get your order delivered right away on or before your first payment. Putting aside fundamentals, BNPL itself is controversial. To critics and regulators around the world, it promotes irresponsible spending and enables overconsumption. In this episode, we’ll explore the business model of BNPL, its eerie similarities to the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, and why that matters now more than ever in the coming recession. 🎧 Audio Editing & Mixing Credits: Sonalf 0:00 The Rise of Buy Now, Pay Later 6:01 Generational Tipping Point 11:58 House of Mirrors 19:32 Castles in the Sky 24:12 The BNPL Flywheel 30:43 Of Their Own Accord 36:47 Boiling Frogs