Category: Company News

With more than $109 billion in cash and marketable securities on hand, Google is often at the center of M&A speculation — who the company should buy, who it missed out on. But CEO Sundar Pichai says the company has a “very high bar” to do a deal.

“Really we are always evaluating opportunities,” he said on the company’s Q4 earnings call. “To me it’s been more about us finding the right fit rather than being constrained by anything in particular.”

Google had a shot at open source software companies GitHub and Red Hat last year, but ultimately lost out to Microsoft and IBM respectively. CNBC reported in October that Google held talks with both companies, but was ultimately outbid or walked away. The company has also previously looked at Twitter and Snap, according to media reports.

With former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian replacing Diane Greene as Alphabet’s new head of cloud, rumors are swirling about possible big acquisitions in the enterprise software space.

“It’s always an important part of our strategy, and we have done great acquisitions in the past things like YouTube and Android Wear — big acquisitions for us,” Pichai said. “And so we continue to look for opportunities ahead.”

WATCH: Loup Ventures Gene Munster gives instant reaction to Alphabet earnings

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Bots, including thousands originating in Russia and Iran, as well as those created in the United States, were a much more active presence on Twitter during the November midterm elections last year than was previously known.

More than 15,000 Twitter accounts identified as robots used the #ivoted hashtag on Election Day, according to a new study, which came from the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute and a Swiss researcher. In virtually every U.S. state, more than a fifth of those posting about the elections on Twitter in the weeks before Election Day were robots.

In contrast, Twitter released findings last week that focused mainly on foreign efforts. Days before the midterms, Twitter made a splash when it confirmed it had removed 10,000 bots pretending to be Democrats.

Between Oct. 6 and Nov. 19, nearly two weeks after Election Day, the researchers behind Monday’s report identified more than 200,000 bots posting about the midterm elections, compared to about 750,000 humans.

The new figures are included in a report published by researchers who collected and analyzed millions of Twitter posts, and in a subsequent study to be released in the coming days.

The research provides more detail about interference operations that Twitter said on Thursday were found to originate within Iran, Venezuela and Russia.

Thousands of those bots could be traced to Russia and several hundred could be traced to Iran, according to Emilio Ferrara, one of the study’s four authors and the principal investigator in the Machine Intelligence and Data Science group at USC’s Information Sciences Institute.

Still, much of the bot activity appeared to originate in the United States or had no clear provenance, he said. External researchers do not have as much information as Twitter and law enforcement about where accounts originate.

In a statement for this story, Twitter spokesman Ian Plunkett called the company’s report the “the single source of truth from our side on the election.” The Department of Justice declined to comment, and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

In August, Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, removed hundreds of accounts tied to Iran ahead of the midterm races. Two reports prepared for the U.S. Senate and released in December found that Russia used every major social media platform to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Disinformation will be in the spotlight in the coming months as Twitter and other platforms seek to avoid a repeat of 2016, in which the Russian government amplified American cultural divides using deceptive social media practices. The companies are working to prevent fake actors from using their services while protecting the ability of their human users to express political viewpoints.

To identify which accounts were bots, the researchers used a sophisticated tool developed at the University of Indiana.

The “Botometer” uses machine learning techniques to determine whether an account is operated by a human or by a software algorithm. Ferrara said the tool correctly designated an account about 95 percent of the time.

The same tool was used by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to identify 10,000 bots that Twitter ultimately removed from its platform in the weeks before voters went to the polls last year.

Ferrara, who helped develop the tool, said that the 10,000 accounts removed by Twitter in the runup to Election Day served as a motivational factor for the research project.

“We thought there might be more,” he said. “It turns out that these 10,000 bots that were posting, they might not have been the entire picture. They might have been a fraction.”

In total, the researchers located 209,106 tweets that included the #ivoted hashtag on Election Day. The authors of those tweets included 15,856 bots and 62,306 humans, according to the study.

Still, Ferrara said that the number of bots active in the 2018 elections appeared to represent a dramatic reduction compared to 2016, possibly as a result of Twitter’s efforts to remove bots from its platform. He said that there was just a tenth of the number of bots in the midterms compared to in the presidential cycle.

In its report, Twitter said it had removed the “vast majority” of accounts that appeared to be tied to the Russian government prior to the midterm elections. It said it identified and suspended about 3,000 bot accounts tied to Iran and removed about 750 bot accounts located in Venezuela.

Ferrara warned that it was impossible to tell whether the reduction in bot activity since 2016 was the result of increased monitoring efforts or if the bots were becoming more sophisticated and avoiding detection. Efforts to combine human input with automated posting can muddy the waters and make it harder for machine learning tools to detect the signals they are trained to locate, he said.

The bots posted prolifically in support of both Democratic and Republican candidates and issues. In particular, the bots focused on voter suppression and voter fraud. They sought to generate chaos more than advance any particular political agenda, Ferrara said.

But human users reacted differently to the Democratic and Republican bots, according to Ferrara.

“We have the more liberal bots that are more inflammatory, they create more of this chaos and confusion if you like, and on the other hand, however, the conservative bots are more influential,” he said.

Twitter has said that researchers sometimes fail to take into account the work it does to remove spam-like content from the surface layers of its platform, such as which accounts appear in search.

But Ferrara noted that the bot accounts gained traction among human users, and that conservative bots were more effective. They gained larger followings, earned more retweets and overall had a stronger effect.

“Conservative bots have a much more prominent position in these information sharing networks,” Ferrara said. “They project a stronger influence on the human users.”

Law enforcement groups warned ahead of the midterm elections that foreign actors were attempting to interfere in the Democratic process. In a joint statement, the DHS, DOJ, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI instructed Americans to be vigilant.

“Americans should be aware that foreign actors — and Russia in particular — continue to try to influence public sentiment and voter perceptions through actions intended to sow discord,” the agencies wrote. “They can do this by spreading false information about political processes and candidates, lying about their own interference activities, disseminating propaganda on social media, and through other tactics.”

The health joint venture formed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and J.P. Morgan Chase’s still doesn’t have a name, but it does have a chief technology officer.

In a blog post on LinkedIn, Serkan Kutan, the former technology chief at doctor-booking start-up Zocdoc, wrote that, “I am thrilled to now announce that I am serving as CTO of this new venture.” Kutan’s LinkedIn profile says he took the job in January.

A spokesperson for the health initiative confirmed Kutan’s hiring.

The three companies came together a year ago to announce the formation of the non-profit-seeking venture, whose purpose is to improve health quality and bring down costs for employees. Dr. Atul Gawande, a writer and surgeon, was named CEO in June.

Not much has been shared yet on Gawande’s plan or the overall strategy of the project, but Kutan described it as “the most promising attempt to improve health care in the U.S.”

Kutan said in the post that he received a news alert about the hiring of Gawande last year and thought to himself, “to be the CTO for this initiative would be a dream job.”

Kutan’s previous role at Zocdoc involved building the technology that consumers use to book doctors’ appointments. Zocdoc is one of the few health companies that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has personally funded through his investment group, Bezos Expeditions.

WATCH: It’s Dr. Atul Gawande’s first day on the job as CEO

Democrats screamed “spoiler!” when former Starbucks CEO and Chairman Howard Schultz said more than a week ago that he was thinking about running for president as a centrist independent.

Now a major Democratic group is putting that outrage to work with opposition research focusing on the coffee giant’s history of settling lawsuits with their own employees.

American Bridge 21st Century – which has a war chest supported by influential financiers such as George Soros, investment executive Bernard Schwartz and real estate tycoon George Marcus, according to federal filings – is mounting an offensive against Schultz, whom many Democrats see as a threat to potentially siphon votes away from the party’s nominee in 2020.

The super PAC, which was founded by David Brock, a liberal commentator and leader of Media Matters for America, gave CNBC a first look at the research. It says Starbucks paid off $46 million in settlements to employees complaining about wage and compensation issues, much of the time while Schultz was often at the helm.

Schultz served as chairman and CEO of Starbucks from 1987 to 2000 before becoming the chief global strategist. He returned to leading the company as CEO in 2008 and eventually became executive chairman. He stepped down in 2018 and is considering running for president.

While some of these settlements noted by the super PAC did not take place when Schultz was either CEO or chairman, the group is clearly trying to convince voters that under his leadership, Starbucks took advantage of employees. The messaging campaign comes as Democratic leaders and donors have slammed Schultz for even considering running as an independent because, they argue, it will split the vote in 2020 and give President Donald Trump a second term.

“The country deserves to know the truth about Howard Schultz’s real record,” Andrew Bates, a spokesman for American Bridge, told CNBC. “The last thing the American people are hungry for is another arrogant billionaire who takes advantage of anyone he can, just like the man currently sitting in the Oval Office. Schultz can’t win the presidency – all he can do is ensure that Donald Trump stays in the White House for another disastrous 4 years.”

A spokesman for Schultz, Tucker Warren, said the super PAC’s attacks serve as proof for the former coffee CEO’s criticism of the two-party system.

“This attack is a perfect illustration of how broken the system is and how the Washington attack machine has corrupted our politics,” Warren said. “The small group of individuals who fund this effort should spend their energy advancing their ideas, not just tearing people down.”

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Starbucks referred CNBC to a memo sent by current CEO Kevin Johnson to employees last week and highlighted part of the message that emphasizes the company does not get take part in political campaigns.

“As a company, we don’t get involved in national political campaigns. And nothing changes for Starbucks,” Johnson said. “As we have for the past 48 years since Starbucks was founded, we will continue to live Our Mission and Values and create a great Starbucks customer experience in each of our stores. … And as Starbucks partners, we have a responsibility to always recognize and respect the diversity of perspectives of all customers and partners on these topics.”

The spokesman also provided an outline of the extensive benefits Starbucks employees receive and their diverse hiring practices.

The PAC’s research lists a suit filed in California Superior Court in 2001, when a Starbucks employee claimed they were not paid sufficient overtime expenses that were owed to them based on state law. In April 2002, Starbucks settled the case and a similar class action lawsuit for $18 million.

“Given the unique aspects of California wage and hour laws, which differ significantly from federal and other state laws, we believe this settlement was the best solution for all parties involved,” Jennifer O’Connor, Starbucks’s legal counsel at the time of the agreement, said in a press release.

Another settlement the PAC focuses on took place in Massachusetts, where a former barista claimed the coffee chain broke state law by forcing him to share tips with his direct supervisors. The former employee, Hernan Matamoros, and at least three other former baristas, won a settlement of $23.5 million in 2013 after a five year court battle. The payout, according to the court filing at the time, compensated “all baristas who worked at Starbucks from the beginning of the class period, March 2005, until January 2013.”

Schultz, who said he is no longer a Democrat, sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party when he told “60 Minutes,” in an interview aired last week, that he was seriously considering an independent campaign for president in 2020.

Top Democratic donors in New York ripped Schultz looking to run as an independent and megadonor Haim Saban told CNBC that he believes the former coffee maker executive should run as a Democrat instead. Billionaire and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who may run as a Democrat for president in 2020 and in the past has considered an independent bid, appeared to warn his fellow billionaire that an independent run would split the ticket, giving an advantage to Trump. He did not specifically name the former Starbucks executive in his statement.

Still, there are others who argue that Democrats are overplaying their hand with their attacks on Schultz and that it’s too early to say what impact an independent run may have on the 2020 election.

John Weaver, a senior strategist for former Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who also is considering running either as a Republican or independent in 2020, recently told CNBC that people shouldn’t jump to conclusions about Schultz’s potential candidacy.

“I think all of these attacks, with everybody’s hair on fire, are the same people who reassured us that Hillary Clinton would win,” Weaver said. “Ten months from now, I don’t know if Kamala Harris will still be in the race. I don’t know if Howard Schultz would be in the race. We’ll see if consumers will buy into any of these people’s efforts.”

On a possible independent candidacy, Charlie Black, a senior advisor on Sen. John McCain’s and Kasich’s runs for president, agreed that Schultz would likely take votes away from the Democratic nominee. But he also stressed that it’s too soon to know what impact he will have in the next election.

“Schultz probably pulls more votes from the Democrats, but there are a few upscale Republicans he might attract. Hard to say until he mounts his campaign for a while and there is a Democratic nominee” Black said in an email. “I doubt he can break 10%, even with a good campaign,” he added.

Kellyanne Conway, an advisor to Trump, argued that Democrats are “bullying” Schultz, and that their tactics make them appear “desperate and overdone.”

Read the opposition research file below:

Ex-NFL star Nick Lowery proved he has some serious skills off the field — he was named the winner of the 2018 CNBC stock draft on Monday.

The former kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs and New York Jets, who was up against seven other teams, scored big with his picks of Amazon, Goldman Sachs and AMD. Lowery and the other competitors made one pick per round, for three rounds, in the draft last April. They chose from a list of 60 investments.

Lowery’s final score was based on the average performance of his three stock picks from the closing price on April 26, 2018, to last Friday’s close.

“Timing is everything,” said Lowery, who joked about unseating the 2017 champ, “Mr. Wonderful” Kevin O’Leary. “It just makes it extra special,” he said on “Power Lunch.”

O’Leary, chairman of O’Shares Investments, an investor on “Shark Tank” and a CNBC contributor, came in fifth place this time around, with his picks of Chevron, Blue Apron and Boeing. Blue Apron was among the worst-performing stocks in the draft – down 39 percent from the start of the contest.

AMD proved to be key to Lowery’s success. The semiconductor company is up more than 118 percent since April 27. However, Lowery didn’t select the stock until the third round — and it was the second-to-last pick in the draft.

The former football player likened the company to Julian Edelman, the wide receiver of the New England Patriots who was named Super Bowl MVP on Sunday. He said AMD had the endurance to stick with it and never compromised its standards.

“In the next year they are going to be taking more and more market share from the big giant, Intel,” Lowery predicted. “That’s an achievement and it’s only because [CEO] Lisa Su reaffirmed their values and their persistence to get it exactly right.”

Amazon was Lowery’s first pick in the draft. The stock, which was on fire most of last year and at one point hit $1 trillion in market value during intraday trading, fell into bear market territory Friday. The drop came after the company announced on a call with investors on Thursday that it would likely increase investment in 2019. It also said it had concerns about new regulation in India.

However, Amazon is still up more than 7 percent since the 2018 CNBC stock draft began.

Lowery compared the tech giant to the Patriots’ Bill Belichick, who won his sixth championship as head coach in Sunday’s Super Bowl. He also won two more Super Bowl titles as defensive coordinator for the New York Giants.

“He’s got core values and he is looking for intelligence and talent” and “that is what Amazon has done,” he said.

The investment bank was the worst-performing stock of Lowery’s picks, down about 17 percent since the start of the draft.

However, he’s still a believer in the name. Sticking with the Super Bowl theme, he compared the company to Patriots owner Robert Kraft. Like Kraft, Goldman re-established its dominance in its field, Lowery said. The Patriots lost the 2018 Super Bowl to the Philadelphia Eagles but came back for the win this year. And Goldman Sachs, he said, is once again an authority in mergers and acquisitions.

“You’re going to see a lot of $50 [billion] and $100 billion mergers from Goldman Sachs,” Lowery predicted.

Lowery will defend his title in the CNBC 2019 Stock Draft on April 25.

Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank.”

— CNBC’s Stefanie Kratter contributed to this report.

Disclaimer

Anheuser-Busch used one of its Super Bowl ads to shame Bud Light rivals Miller Lite and Coors Light for using corn syrup to brew their beers, but dietitians say the sweetener isn’t all that bad when used in the fermentation process.

In the 60-second commercial, an order for corn syrup inadvertently shows up at the wrong castle. The Bud Light king takes an arduous journey up mountains and across the sea to deliver it to the Miller Lite and Coors Light castles, which both use corn syrup in their brewing processes.

The ad prompted backlash from corn grower industry groups and Millers Lite and Coors Light, who are both owned by MillerCoors, the U.S. subsidiary of Molson Coors. Added sugars, especially high-fructose corn syrup, have come under intense scrutiny fueling an obesity epidemic that has left nearly 40 percent of U.S. adults obese.

While corn syrup sounds pretty close to high-fructose corn syrup, it’s actually quite different on the molecular level, Margaret Slavin, an associate professor in nutrition and food studies at George Mason University, told CNBC.

Corn syrup is essentially corn starch that has been mostly broken down into single glucose molecules. To make high-fructose corn syrup, scientists use enzymes that change about half of those glucose molecules into fructose. The result is a sweeter substance that’s cheaper to produce than regular sugar.

Miller Lite and Coors Light use corn syrup to feed yeast in the brewing process. Yeast eats sugar, in this case corn syrup, and turns it into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Anheuser-Busch uses rice to feed the yeast when brewing Bud Light. Rice takes a little bit longer to digest because corn syrup is pre-digested, since the enzymes break it down, Slavin explains.

The end result for both? Beer.

“I’m a little surprised at (corn syrup) being used in advertising in such a way,” said Slavin, a registered dietitian. “I think it’s more playing on consumer hot topics and concerns than on a particular scientific concern whether or not they’re using sugar or rice or some other refined grain to feed the yeast.”

Nicole Lund, sports dietitian at NYU Langone, said one of her clients came in Monday asking her what she thought about the commercial and the implication that consumers should stay away from beer made with corn syrup. He said one of his friends prefers Coors Light and was a little nervous about drinking it.

Like Slavin, Lund says the ad plays into consumer fears about high-fructose corn syrup and weight gain. Our bodies store whatever they haven’t used for energy. Added sugars are typically found in foods we tend to overeat, like soda or candy, so they commonly get stored as fat, she said.

However, it’s not really an issue when sugars get mostly stripped out during the beer-making process, she said.

“With a lot of these trendy things, you have to take a step back and decide how big of an issue it is to your life, but for the most part, that’s probably not somebody’s biggest issue,” Lund said. “Especially if they’re drinking six beers a day, it would probably be more about the quantity than which beer they’re choosing.”

MillerCoors, which makes Miller, Coors and a variety of other lagers and brews, agreed. In a post on its website titled “About those Bud Light ads,” Miller took a jab at its rival and explained why brewers use the syrupy sweetener.

“As Anheuser-Busch pointed out in a series of low-performing television spots aired during Sunday’s football game, both Miller Lite and Coors Light use corn-derived sugars during fermentation,” Miller said, adding that it “aids in making them light-bodied, easy-drinking beers with reduced calories and carbohydrates.” It also said that none of the sugars make their way into the final product.

Anheuser-Busch has been promoting its transparency efforts. In January, Bud Light became the first beer in the U.S. to start displaying ingredient labels.

“We don’t have anything against corn syrup, we just don’t use it in Bud Light,” the company said in a statement. “Consumers want transparency and we’re providing it. Bud Light’s Super Bowl commercials are only meant to point out a key difference in Bud Light from some other light beers.”

Google’s capital spending is growing much faster than its revenue.

Alphabet said in Monday’s earnings report that Google’s capital expenditures, which include the costs of data centers and other facilities, more than doubled in 2018, that fastest expansion in at least four years.

While the vast majority of Google’s revenue comes from advertising, the company has been picking up more business from cloud applications and cloud-based infrastructure, which requires data center equipment. Google also continues to hire rapidly across the globe, requiring it to buy and lease more space for people to work.

Google’s capital expenditures in 2018 increased 102 percent to $25.14 billion, up from a growth rate of 34 percent in 2017. In the fourth quarter, spending surged 80 percent to $6.85 billion, while revenue rose 21 percent to $39.1 billion. (Alphabet reported total sales of $39.3 billion.)

Alphabet spent much more last year than rival Microsoft, which shelled out $16 billion in capital expenditures, up less than 39 percent year over year.

Data center expansion is critical for Google as is builds out its cloud computing capacity. Additionally, the company bought Chelsea Market in New York and has made real estate investments since in places including Texas.

Alphabet’s headcount in 2018 rose 23 percent to 98,771.

WATCH: Watch these two big metrics in Alphabet’s earnings report

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is mounting her 2020 presidential campaign as a liberal firebrand supporting universal health care, opposing corporate cash in politics and taking on President Donald Trump at every opportunity.

A number of other Democratic presidential hopefuls are making similar plays — Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker co-sponsored the same Medicare-for-all bill as Gillibrand, for instance. But the 52-year-old Gillibrand stands apart from her colleagues by being able to boast of having voted against the president and his interests more than any other senator, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis.

Yet Gillibrand, who has served in the Senate since 2009, also has shifted some of her positions since her days in the House, when she took more moderate and conservative positions on issues such as illegal immigration and guns.

Here are the key issues she’s running on as the 2020 campaign picks up steam.

As the Trump administration touts the steps it has taken to dismantle Obamacare, Democratic presidential candidates are poised to make a stronger-than-ever push for increasing government’s role in the health care sector.

Gillibrand, who voted to expand Americans’ access to health care services in the Senate, appears to be no exception. She supported a 2009 measure to require insurers to fully cover a number of health services, and scored a win in 2015 with the passage of legislation she sponsored extending a health care program for the survivors and first responders of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

More recently, she co-sponsored Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2017 bill aiming to replace Obamacare by applying the over-65 government health insurance program Medicare to all Americans. Sanders himself is expected to jump into the Democratic field for 2020.

A decade earlier, advocating the transformation of U.S. health care in a single-payer mold would have fallen outside the Democratic mainstream. Even in the 2018 midterm elections, Republican-allied groups attacked Democratic candidates over the “radical” health care proposal.

But things are different as 2020 approaches. Gillibrand is one of four Democratic contenders to co-sponsor Sanders’ Senate bill, along with Harris, Booker and Warren.

“I believe that health care should be a right and not a privilege,” Gillibrand said during her announcement on Colbert’s talk show.

Gillibrand’s early willingness to condemn allegations of sexual misconduct — even against her political allies — won her the nickname “the #MeToo senator.”

In late 2017, she became the first Senate Democrat to call on her colleague, Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., to resign after he was accused of attempting to grope or forcibly kiss multiple women. Franken voluntarily left the Senate at the beginning of 2018 as the pressure mounted from dozens of his Democratic colleagues, although he denied the allegations against him.

Near the height of the #MeToo movement’s influence on Capitol Hill, Gillibrand again broke ranks with her party when she said that former President Bill Clinton should have resigned over his in-office affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Those actions have prompted a mix of praise and scorn from Democrats — which reportedly include some Democratic donors — but have also immunized her from accusations of partisanship when calling on Trump himself to resign over allegations of sexual assault.

“Those are very credible allegations of misconduct and criminal activity, and he should be fully investigated and he should resign,” she said of the president in a late 2017 interview on CNN. More than a dozen women have publicly accused Trump of inappropriate behavior including sexual misconduct; Trump has denied the allegations.

Gillibrand hasn’t always sold herself as a liberal crusader.

During her short tenure in the House of Representatives, Gillibrand represented an upstate New York district and was known as a member of the more conservative “Blue Dog” coalition of Democrats.

She held an “A” grade from the National Rifle Association, and once told reporters that she slept with guns under her bed.

On immigration, Gillibrand opposed amnesty for illegal immigrants and supported legislation to make English the “official language” of the U.S.

Once she was appointed to Clinton’s Senate seat, however, Gillibrand took an about-face on both issues.

The NRA quickly revised Gillibrand’s perfect score to an “F” after she began consistently voting against the powerful gun lobby’s interests. And where she once took a more hawkish immigration stance, Gillibrand in June espoused the controversial view that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, should be abolished.

Gillibrand has explained that her swing toward her party’s left flank came from exposure to ideas and communities outside of her House district.

“After I got appointed [to the Senate], I went down to Brooklyn to meet with families who had suffered from gun violence in their communities,” she said of her flip on gun policy during an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

On her new immigration stance, Gillibrand said “I came from a district that was 98 percent white … I just didn’t take the time to understand why these issues mattered because it wasn’t right in front of me. And that was my fault. It was something that I’m embarrassed about and I’m ashamed of.”

If Gillibrand shares any common ground with Trump, it may be in the “populist” economic label that is often applied to both of their economic platforms.

Trump’s populist brand of blue-collar advocacy served as the rhetorical basis for his administration slapping new tariffs on imports and backing out of multilateral global treaties.

Gillibrand’s economic populism, on the other hand, includes a federal jobs guarantee and a general wariness of corporate influence in politics.

“Every ill in Congress, no matter what it is, it will stem from the fact that money corrupts politicians and politics,” she told The New York Times in an interview published in July.

She has also endorsed a “Wall Street tax” on financial transactions in the stock market, and promised to take no money from political action committees — positions she highlighted in response to CNBC’s report in January that she had personally called Wall Street executives to gauge their interest in her possible 2020 run.

Gillibrand tweet

But Gillibrand has also received backlash from the left for her outreach to wealthy Democratic donors on Wall Street and in the financial business in general.