Posted on 01/12/2017 2:36:19 AM PST by expat_panama
On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump’s first news conference since July didn’t deliver fresh insights into the billionaire’s policies, but it did manage to whipsaw Wall Street stocks.
U.S. equities tumbled after the presser started, with comments from Trump that drug companies were “getting away with murder” with respect to pricing. However, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.50% the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.28% and the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.21% all closed higher in the wake of the hourlong conference.
Equities had traded higher on the promise clarity on Trump’s promise of delivering a shot in the arm to the U.S. economy, but with a dearth of details and a focus on railing against news outlets, stock investors struggled for a spark. The news event also took an odd turn, with Trump at one point batting down a series of reporter requests to pose questions, one with the declaration: “You are fake news!”
Here’s how some of the trading action played out in a number of assets:
The Dow
Stocks spent the session in choppy trade, following the drop that kick off the press conference. Toward the end of the session, stocks recovered from their lows of the day, with the Dow closing up 0.5% at 19,954.28, putting the blue-chip gauge about less than 50 points shy of the psychologically significant 20,000 level Wall Street has been breathlessly watching.
Biotech stocks
The biggest losers from those comments have been health-care shares...
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
Gold was dumping yesterday and reversed course...up again this morning
The more that he tells people how easy it’s going to be to replace Obamacare with something everyone will love, and to pass a gigantic and unnecessarily complex tax reform that everyone will love, the more he is setting this market up for a MASSIVE disappointment trade.
Love the smell of speculators losing their shirts in the morning... smells like... reality.
Stock market goes up.
Stock market goes down.
Every day.
SSDD.
It looks like the stock market dropped during the press conference, suggesting to me that everyone stopped to watch the presser.
MW is liberal tripe.... I’m sure if someone looks back you’ll find them saying that Trump did not help the markets... & now he is hurting his own market - they always want it both ways.
--except a few traders who never listen to Trump because they're too scared of him. When the adults came back to work the market day finished up.
A little over a hundred points overall and one biotech ETF dropped ten. Big whoop. Statistical noise.
Projection by the left...another fake news nugget.
I’m sure all the Wall Street traders took an hour off from their trading to watch the press conference..........NOT!
I am sick to death of giving a damn about the healthcare companies, particularly the drug makers. These companies, and a lot of non-public ones in the industry, all engage in monopolistic practices that violate all kinds of laws. The result is that we are going broke paying for their profits. Much of what ails our economy is wrapped up in absurdly high medical costs; one never knows what a procedure or hospital stay is going to cost until you get the bill. No other business is able to get away with that, why should they?
Or are willing to go along with to suit their own agenda.
well what happened is sellers lost and buyers won during the interval of uncertainty.
Yep, the same MW who said that the market would tank if Trump was elected.
Novel approach to attack Trump buy built on stupid and false idea that Wall Street guys actually understand anything about the world outside ,
He was never Wall Street’s guy, and I don’t expect them to like him, or his actions.
Trump told the truth on stock prices. U.S. citizens should not be paying higher prices to subsidize how Pharma accepts the government dictated prices set in Canada and all over Europe.
The cure? Set government fixed prices here? No.
The cure is a simple rule that would say drug companies selling drugs here cannot sell them for an average price that is higher than the median of the government-fixed prices they are forced to accept in other countries.
They will start telling other countries they will have to either quit selling some of their drugs to them, or get some higher prices from them. In some cases their prices overseas WILL go up, and in some cases they will quit selling some drugs in some other countries. Meanwhile, until the rest of the world adopts market prices for drugs, U.S. prices will come down.
These days everyone says they're saying what Trump said (?!) but imho we all would do well to put a lot more effort into quoting him accurately. From the actual transcript here's the part where he said stuff about drug prices:
...I appreciate that from Ford. I appreciate it very much from Fiat Chrysler. I hope that General Motors will be following, and I think they will be.
I think a lot of people will be following. I think a lot of industries are going to be coming back. We have to get our drug industry coming back. Our drug industry has been disastrous. They're leaving left and right. They supply our drugs, but they don't make them here, to a large extent. And the other thing we have to do is create new bidding procedures for the drug industry, because they're getting away with murder.
Pharma. Pharma has a lot of lobbies and a lot of lobbyists and a lot of power, and there's very little bidding on drugs. We're the largest buyer of drugs in the world, and yet, we don't bid properly. And we're going to start bidding and we're going to save billions of dollars over a period of time, and we're going to do that with a lot of other industries...
My take is that it seems he was not about to waste everyone's time with details about exactly who this "we" is and that he's talking about gov't procurement --although he may be talking about allowing drug price competition w/ overseas vendors (so much for Trump being a 'protectionist'). He's not a precise speaker because he never lets mere precision get in the way of being an effective speaker. After having seen how his leadership is translating into action I'm willing to wait and see how this pharma bid thing plays out.
So simple, right? They should just hit that "Easy" button that Staples sells.
The reality, however, is much different. Who will defend the intellectual property of the drug companies when they tell these countries what's what, as you suggest, and these same countries laugh as they ignore the patents and turn their generic, knock off, industries loose?
And when price controls are imposed on us, in an effort to deliver drugs for people and not for profit, where will innovation come from? I tried to think of an innovative therapy developed by a country with price controls but I couldn't come up with one. Quality of life and longevity will certainly improve when these evil profiteers are brought to heel.
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