Bloomberg pours more cash into Cuomo super PAC, bringing his total contribution to $8.3M
NEW YORK — Mike Bloomberg's vast wealth is continuing to power Andrew Cuomo's front-running mayoral bid.
The billionaire former mayor contributed $3.3 million to a super PAC supporting Cuomo's attempted comeback in the nation's largest city — a donation made public on Wednesday that comes just days after Bloomberg gave $5 million to the group.
With the latest gift, Bloomberg is now single-handedly responsible for one-third of the PAC's total haul of $24 million since it launched in March, according to a POLITICO analysis. Other real estate and finance executives who make up New York's monied elite, including billionaire Donald Trump supporter Bill Ackman, have poured cash into the group.
A spokesperson for the super PAC, which is called Fix the City, did not comment on Bloomberg's latest contribution.
The money — and the flood of mailers and TV ads funded by it — indicate Cuomo supporters are nervous about the rise of his principal opponent, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. The state lawmaker has been running a strong second to the ex-governor in most polls; a Marist College survey on Wednesday found Cuomo would defeat Mamdani after seven rounds of ranked-choice voting, 55 percent to 45 percent. But early voting is high in some neighborhoods that would appear to benefit Mamdani, and temperatures are expected to hit 100 degrees next Tuesday, which could suppress turnout among older New Yorkers Cuomo is counting on.
Likely motivating Bloomberg, who had a rivalry with the former governor during their overlapping tenures, are Mamdani's far-left politics and criticism of Israel. He wants to raise taxes on the rich to pay for services like free bus fare and as recently as this week, refused to criticize the phrase 'globalize the Intifada,' calling it an expression of Palestinian rights.
The former mayor endorsed Cuomo last week, and called him the 'one candidate whose management experience and government know-how stand above the others.' Cuomo is 67 and worked in and around government and politics his entire career; Mamdani is 33 and counters criticisms of his thin résumé with reminders of the scandals that drove Cuomo from office.
The super PAC has been a significant source of support for the ex-governor, who is considered the favorite to win next Tuesday's Democratic primary despite tightening polls. The group has spent more than $14.8 million on TV ads — including a $5.4 million spot slamming Mamdani — according to media tracking firm AdImpact.
The super PAC, which is subject to higher ad rates than campaigns, has easily outspent Cuomo's rivals and is the best-funded PAC ever to play a role in municipal elections in New York City.
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CNBC
an hour ago
- CNBC
The market is as hopeful as it's been in ages. The winners and losers might surprise you
When the tyranny of the "Magnificent Seven" ended, I always figured the money would go to the rest of tech. I also didn't think that there would be anything left of the Mag 7 to invest in. They would all be obliterated as part of a source-of-funds move. Club name Nvidia would be grounded by China fears, both DeepSeek and restrictions by President Donald Trump. It was too good to be true, when Nvidia was in the high $80s a share, that it could find its way to new highs. Microsoft , another portfolio member, would falter because Copilot would falter. How in heck could Microsoft's stock retain its leadership thanks to Azure growth picking up by just a few percentage point? The answer to this conundrum is something I have started to come to terms with that calls into question the entire world of stock picking: I am beginning to think the nature of buying the right stocks has shifted from some hedge-fund playbook to a retail-majority fascination that is disrupting everything coupled with a level of hopefulness about individual stocks not seen in ages. I think that much of it stems from a belief that Trump, like him or not, may turn out to be fabulous for the stock market because he is putting in regulators that are pro-business and against a fundamental belief that business itself of any size — including small business — is evil. I know this view cuts across a variety of lines, but it is based on the charts themselves, a comprehensive examination of more than a thousand charts to understand this incredibly complex market. So let's break it down by pattern and see if my view can hold up to scrutiny. First, the clear winner in this market, bar none, is the financials. That covers insurers. It includes regional banks. But it really involves the majors, including the likes of JPMorgan , Goldman Sachs , Morgan Stanley , Wells Fargo and Citigroup , as well as names like asset management giant BlackRock , which is newly anointed after struggling for some time. We own Goldman, Wells and BlackRock for the Club. I can't emphasize enough how important this move financials is. It encompasses a multitude of thoughts, a cornucopia of positives the likes of which we haven't seen in ages, and they revolve around what could be an extended trend involving multiple expansion from the current range of roughly 14 to 15 times earnings to something closer to the market's 22 multiple. How is that possible? A few reasons: We are beginning to believe that deep in the heart of the Biden administration was a core group of administrators in the agencies who were from the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party. That's the part of the party that many traditional Democrats feel has hijacked the apparatus and may have been responsible for some of the backlash that led to the disaffection of typical middle-of-the-road bankers who might have been enthusiastic Democratic supporters but went for Trump or didn't vote at all. Those agency administrators — including those in the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department, but also the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and all of the others that interfaced with businesses — simply had a dislike for Corporate America that mimicked that of former President Joe Biden. As someone who followed Biden's career and knew him fairly well at one point, I was shocked how anti-business he had become. The core group who ran the country in the last two years may have been as antithetical to the positives of business as any that our history has recorded, maybe even in the first years of Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, maybe worse. The insult to business found its leader in former FTC chief Lina Khan, a 36-year-old populist firebrand who was an anathema to business and tried to check its every move. She reminded me of a modern-day Mary Lease. But she was almost outdone by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which, at its core, despised the banks it regulated and truly viewed them as the oil behind the kleptocratic machine that drove an ever-widening wedge between the rich and the poor. Without the incredibly fast dismantling of what amounted to a nihilist fifth column within the government, we are seeing nothing more than a wholesale revision of a group of stocks that has been shackled ever since the 2008 financial crisis when the multiples were far higher than they are now. With the anti-business wing of the Democrats now crushed, we are left with a nexus of banks that will be able to print money the following ways: Facilitating a merger wave that will be among the most powerful in history after it had been on hold because of Khan's strident policies. Mergers and acquisitions involves a small handful of people at these banks so their profit margins will be immense. A more forgiving "stress test" from the Federal Reserve with an easy curve that will allow much more money to be put to work lending. We just saw the beginnings of this Friday evening , and more reform could be on the way. An initial public offering market that will be intense, and I expect many private equity-owned companies that have been kept on those firms' balance sheets will be offloaded on the public. A wave of foreign buyers because of a weak dollar, a la the period between 1987 to 1989. A dramatic shift of disrupters who will IPO even as they pretended they did not want to. They can't help themselves. There's too much stock-based compensation for younger employees to stay private. A dramatic cost reduction accomplished by cutting the number of younger associates who specialized in meeting ever-increasing regulations and documentation who did nothing but repeat the same document writing over and over. Now that can be done by artificial intelligence. This new regime can last a couple of years and, on net, will produce equity shrinkage before the secondary offerings overwhelm the market. It is breathtaking in its power because it is producing stock-chart breakouts the likes of which I have never seen before. That includes credit card issuers like Club name Capital One and American Express , along with the money centers and investment banks. Second set of winners: the data centers and all of its accoutrements. This move is tectonic in nature because we have never seen an industrial revolution like this before. Some want to compare it to the internet bubble. I view it as a space race among a host of companies that must spend money to stay in the new game of generative AI, which can change the way we do everything from banking and self-driving to robots and the construction of buildings and ships. That's Meta Platforms , Amazon , Alphabet , Microsoft, Oracle and Tesla for those who are counting. We own Meta, Amazon and Microsoft for the Club. At the heart of this technological revolution is the physical data center itself. It's based around semiconductors, not software, and that's a huge change. If you look at the software companies, especially enterprise software, you see stalled stocks like ServiceNow , Workday , MongoDB , Salesforce , Accenture and Adobe . These are truly struggling stocks this year that now feel like they are all going against each other. There are some surprising names on that list. Contrast those charts with the performance of names like Club name Eaton , Carrier , Johnson Controls and Emerson Electric for the grid; or GE Vernova , Quanta Services and really anything involving natural gas or nuclear power; or CoreWeave and Nebius , as well as Vertiv , Cummins and Arm Holdings . These moves are insanely powerful. The money coming out of enterprise software is making a beeline to the much smaller semi cohort like Analog Devices , KLA Corp , Lam Research , Texas instruments , Advanced Micro Devices and Micron . The amount of money coming into the exchange-traded funds that agglomerate these segments is spectacular. Oh, and let me say it again for emphasis: Nvidia. There is a small and puzzling group of contract manufacturers — Flex , Celestica and Jabil — with stock moves that defy logic. I don't have a line on it yet, but it is a fascinating move. And then there are the companies that have figured out how to minimize their tariffs and are ready to roll come July 9, the day that Trump's 90-day pause is set to expire. Then there are the losers, and they are so hideous I wouldn't even deign to think of them as a possibility in a fund: drugs, foods, consumer packaged goods, retailers save the dollar stores, fast food (as opposed to fast casual), and oil and gas. These are plain out sources of funds and can't be trusted to hold no matter how big their yields might become. Take a look at Conagra and Campbell's if you disagree. What's it all mean? This is a market where the discourse is radically at odds with what we talk about all day. We are so stuck on Fed talk — should they cut? — that we are part of the hideous misdirection play that is going on in the professional discourse of the moment. These buyers and the stocks they buy don't care about any of what "we" talk about, and I have to redouble my efforts to try to blunt what I see as a radical mistake in coverage that is geared toward hedge funds and not the dominant chord of individual investors. Oh and remember, I am not even talking about the youthful traders who congregate around stocks like Coinbase , Robinhood and Michael Saylor's bitcoin-focused Strategy . While that cohort can't be ignored, they are more obvious. They are part of a confused, momentum-oriented new investor class that is led by those who will drive Palantir to $200 a share, an excellent speculative stock by the way. And it is going to $200. Now, I am schooled in the value of the Fed talk myself. But I am trying to pull the wires from my own brainwashing, which is never easy. I need to go back to the 1990s, when what mattered was stock picking — not the S & P 500 and earnings; not sales and companies that did something meaningful; not companies that catered to the enterprise software mob of code-writers who might be obviated by AI; or those who do nothing but trade the S & P and a bunch of stupid ETFs. Will it be difficult to upend the Fed-geared reportage that every single outlet finds to be the holy grail of business journalism? No. Because those who follow it and believe in it don't know jack about individual stocks anyway. Learning about them is a time-consuming anathema. Plus, they don't know their game is atavistic anyway. They don't see themselves as an obstacle to new world performance. Business journalism has gotten away from learning new stories — too difficult and time consuming and not the province of young researchers anyway. They console themselves that they follow Magnificent Seven drizzle and can speak about Tesla with the best of them. In order to help the waning tide of viewers to stay with us, the new manifesto is to learn the "great unwashed" of stock stories that are under $100 billion in market cap that are truly terrific. There are investors who want to own Nvidia or the next Nvidia, and by golly, we better help find them, or we might as well cut the cord, too. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust's portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
CIA chief told lawmakers Iran nuclear program set back years with strikes on metal conversion site
WASHINGTON (AP) — CIA Director John Ratcliffe told skeptical U.S. lawmakers that American military strikes destroyed Iran's lone metal conversion facility and in the process delivered a monumental setback to Tehran's nuclear program that would take years to overcome, a U.S. official said Sunday. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive intelligence, said Ratcliffe laid out the importance of the strikes on the metal conversion facility during a classified hearing for U.S. lawmakers last week. Details about the private briefings surfaced as President Donald Trump and his administration keep pushing back on questions from Democratic lawmakers and others about how far Iran was set back by the strikes before last Tuesday's ceasefire with Israel took hold. 'It was obliterating like nobody's ever seen before,' Trump said in an interview on Fox News Channel's 'Sunday Morning Futures.' 'And that meant the end to their nuclear ambitions, at least for a period of time.' Ratcliffe also told lawmakers that the intelligence community assessed the vast majority of Iran's amassed enriched uranium likely remains buried under the rubble at Isfahan and Fordo, two of the three key nuclear facilities targeted by U.S. strikes. But even if the uranium remains intact, the loss of its metal conversion facility effectively has taken away Tehran's ability to build a bomb for years to come, the official said. Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Sunday on CBS' 'Face the Nation' that the three Iranian sites with 'capabilities in terms of treatment, conversion and enrichment of uranium have been destroyed to an important degree.' But, he added, 'some is still standing' and that because capabilities remain, 'if they so wish, they will be able to start doing this again.' He said assessing the full damage comes down to Iran allowing in inspectors. "Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared, and there is nothing there," Grossi said. Trump has insisted from just hours after three key targets were struck by U.S. bunker-buster bombs and Tomahawk missiles that Iran's nuclear program was 'obliterated.' His defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has said they were 'destroyed.' A preliminary report issued by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, meanwhile, said the strikes did significant damage to the Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan sites, but did not totally destroy the facilities. As a result of Israeli and U.S. strikes, Grossi says that 'it is clear that there has been severe damage, but it's not total damage." Israel claims it has set back Iran's nuclear program by 'many years.' The metal conversion facility that Ratcliffe said was destroyed was located at the Isfahan nuclear facility. The process of transforming enriched uranium gas into dense metal, or metallization, is a key step in building the explosive core of a bomb. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in comments at the NATO summit last week also suggested that it was likely the U.S. strikes had destroyed the metal conversion facility. 'You can't do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility," Rubio said. "We can't even find where it is, where it used to be on the map. You can't even find where it used to be because the whole thing is just blackened out. It's gone. It's wiped out.' The CIA director also stressed to lawmakers during the congressional briefing that Iran's air defense was shattered during the 12-day assault. As a result, any attempt by Iran to rebuild its nuclear program could now easily be thwarted by Israeli strikes that Iran currently has little wherewithal to defend against, the official said. Ratcliffe's briefing to lawmakers on the U.S. findings appeared to mesh with some of Israeli officials' battle damage assessments. Israeli officials have determined that Iran's ability to enrich uranium to a weapons-grade level was neutralized for a prolonged period, according to a senior Israeli military official who was not authorized to talk publicly about the matter. Grossi, and some Democrats, note that Iran still has the know-how. 'You cannot undo the knowledge that you have or the capacities that you have,' Grossi said, emphasizing the need to come to a diplomatic deal on the country's nuclear program.
Hamilton Spectator
an hour ago
- Hamilton Spectator
CIA chief told lawmakers Iran nuclear program set back years with strikes on metal conversion site
WASHINGTON (AP) — CIA Director John Ratcliffe told skeptical U.S. lawmakers that American military strikes destroyed Iran's lone metal conversion facility and in the process delivered a monumental setback to Tehran's nuclear program that would take years to overcome, a U.S. official said Sunday. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive intelligence, said Ratcliffe laid out the importance of the strikes on the metal conversion facility during a classified hearing for U.S. lawmakers last week. Details about the private briefings surfaced as President Donald Trump and his administration keep pushing back on questions from Democratic lawmakers and others about how far Iran was set back by the strikes before last Tuesday's ceasefire with Israel took hold. 'It was obliterating like nobody's ever seen before,' Trump said in an interview on Fox News Channel's 'Sunday Morning Futures.' 'And that meant the end to their nuclear ambitions, at least for a period of time.' Ratcliffe also told lawmakers that the intelligence community assessed the vast majority of Iran's amassed enriched uranium likely remains buried under the rubble at Isfahan and Fordo, two of the three key nuclear facilities targeted by U.S. strikes. But even if the uranium remains intact, the loss of its metal conversion facility effectively has taken away Tehran's ability to build a bomb for years to come, the official said. Rafael Grossi , head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Sunday on CBS' 'Face the Nation' that the three Iranian sites with 'capabilities in terms of treatment, conversion and enrichment of uranium have been destroyed to an important degree.' But, he added, 'some is still standing' and that because capabilities remain, 'if they so wish, they will be able to start doing this again.' He said assessing the full damage comes down to Iran allowing in inspectors. 'Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared, and there is nothing there,' Grossi said. Trump has insisted from just hours after three key targets were struck by U.S. bunker-buster bombs and Tomahawk missiles that Iran's nuclear program was 'obliterated.' His defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has said they were 'destroyed.' A preliminary report issued by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, meanwhile, said the strikes did significant damage to the Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan sites, but did not totally destroy the facilities. As a result of Israeli and U.S. strikes, Grossi says that 'it is clear that there has been severe damage, but it's not total damage.' Israel claims it has set back Iran's nuclear program by 'many years.' The metal conversion facility that Ratcliffe said was destroyed was located at the Isfahan nuclear facility. The process of transforming enriched uranium gas into dense metal, or metallization, is a key step in building the explosive core of a bomb. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in comments at the NATO summit last week also suggested that it was likely the U.S. strikes had destroyed the metal conversion facility. 'You can't do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility,' Rubio said. 'We can't even find where it is, where it used to be on the map. You can't even find where it used to be because the whole thing is just blackened out. It's gone. It's wiped out.' The CIA director also stressed to lawmakers during the congressional briefing that Iran's air defense was shattered during the 12-day assault. As a result, any attempt by Iran to rebuild its nuclear program could now easily be thwarted by Israeli strikes that Iran currently has little wherewithal to defend against, the official said. Ratcliffe's briefing to lawmakers on the U.S. findings appeared to mesh with some of Israeli officials' battle damage assessments. Israeli officials have determined that Iran's ability to enrich uranium to a weapons-grade level was neutralized for a prolonged period, according to a senior Israeli military official who was not authorized to talk publicly about the matter. Tehran's nuclear program also was significantly damaged by the strikes killing key scientists , damage to Iran's missile production industry and the battering of Iran's aerial defense system, according to the Israeli's assessment. Grossi, and some Democrats, note that Iran still has the know-how. 'You cannot undo the knowledge that you have or the capacities that you have,' Grossi said, emphasizing the need to come to a diplomatic deal on the country's nuclear program. ___ AP writer Sam Mednick in Tel Aviv, Israel, contributed to this report. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
