Trump Says 200% Pharma Tariffs Are Coming. Wall Street Shrugs.
When a U.S. president threatens your industry with a 200% tariff, that’s not typically good news.
But since Tuesday, when Donald Trump said in a cabinet meeting that imported pharmaceuticals would face a massive levy, investors have been cautiously celebrating. Despite a broad stock selloff on Friday, the NYSE Arca Pharmaceutical Index is up around 1% over the past week, compared with a basically flat performance for the S&P 500.
That outperformance may seem puzzling, but for Wall Street, the size of the tariff matters less than the timing. The 200% figure lit up cable news chyrons, but investors focused instead on the grace period Trump floated. “We’re going to give people about a year, year and a half to come in, and after that, they’re going to be tariffed,” he said.
A year and a half is a long runway—and it could turn out to be even longer in practice. In a note titled “Tariffs Schmariffs,” Jefferies analyst Akash Tewari argues that if the grace period begins sometime this year and lasts for a year and a half, companies could continue importing drugs tariff-free until 2027. They could buy even more time if they stockpile during that period to cover demand at least until sometime in 2028. That might give them time to build entirely new U.S. manufacturing facilities, which typically takes around four years.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-says-200-pharma-tariffs-110100675.html
Fuck Wall Street. Have they asked people who have to take prescription medication how they feel?
= new reply since forum marked as read
