Mamdanis municipal bond mess will only get worse as mayor prioritizes anti-Israel policies over NYCs fiscal health

New York City is in pretty great shape financially.­Recent drops in the price of its bonds aren’t because of worries about Mayor Mamdani’s socialist fiscal policies.

Instead, it’s because of some stuff happening in DC that’s rattling the entire bond market.That, at least, is the far-fetched spin coming from New York City Comptroller Mark Levine, the city’s independently elected chief fiscal officer.He was responding to questions I had last week about the recent uptick in so-called yields — interest rates on the Big Apple’s municipal debt.For bond-market novices, yields and prices go in opposite directions even as they signal the same thing: the value of lending money to the city.

Yields spike when prices decline because investors demand more compensation for taking the risk of holding a bond until maturity when the loan is repaid (typically in 10 years).That’s exactly what has been happening as Mamdani doubles down on his Marxist Third-Worldism, every minute of every day, it seems.Yields on the 10-year municipal bond spiked for the week ending July 17, to 3.46% from 3.34%, after a jump the week before.These weren’t isolated examples.

Look at a chart of city bond prices since Mamdani took office and, in addition to precipitous drop between January and this month, you see a premium being demanded by investors in the form of higher yields.That trend mellowed out for a time, after he “balanced” his first budget (with various gimmicks, of course), but more recently prices have resumed their descent.Yes, Levine correctly points out that many factors cause city bond prices to seesaw. Bonds in general have been falling across the board because of the high price of oil and inflation fears rooted in policies coming out of Washington.“The recent movement in the city’s bond yields does not indicate an eroding tax base, which is at record levels, or the expectation of a rating downgrade,” comptroller rep Shaquana DeVissiere tells me.“Over...