Week In Review: How Trump's Policies Moved Stocks - July 21, 2019

Trump is considering looking into Pentagon's JEDI contract as U.S.-China trade talks stall.

Catch up on the top industries and stocks that were impacted, or were predicted to be impacted, by the comments, actions and policies of President Donald Trump and his administration with this weekly recap compiled by The Fly:

1. PENTAGON'S CLOUD-COMPUTING CONTRACT: President Trump is looking into the Pentagon's JEDI contract, which is set to be awarded to Amazon (AMZN) or Microsoft (MSFT) and is worth up to $10B over 10 years, to decide whether he should intervene, Bloomberg's Jennifer Jacobs, Naomi Nix and Steven Dennis reported on Thursday. Trump was recently made aware of letters Republican members of Congress have written to the White House and military leaders complaining that the contract's terms froze some companies, including Oracle (ORCL), out of the competition, two people familiar with the matter said, adding that Trump expressed frustration he was not aware of the concerns and asked aides to show him the correspondence. The sources also noted that while Trump said he is interested in looking into the circumstances of the bid, he has not indicated he will try to block the contract from being awarded to one of the two finalists.

2. U.S.-CHINA TRADE TALKS: Progress toward a U.S.-China trade deal has stalled as the Trump administration debates a request to ease restrictions on Huawei Technologies, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the talks.

3. DRUG PROPOSAL HEADLINES: In a research note to investors earlier this week, Raymond James analyst Chris Meekins noted that President Donald Trump has indicated an Executive Order on drug pricing is coming soon, but he believes investors "should be cautious not to overreact" to drug related proposal headlines as he "cannot think of a single proposal that was finalized and also survived a court challenge resulting in a negative impact on earnings" yet from the Trump Administration. Given the history of the current White House to date, Meekins said he is increasingly skeptical the Administration will get anything meaningful finalized and overcome legal challenges that will impact drugmakers' earnings before the 2020 election, he contended. Publicly traded large cap drugmakers include AstraZeneca (AZN), Bristol-Myers (BMY), Eli Lilly (LLY), GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Merck (MRK), Novartis (NVS), Pfizer (PFE), Roche (RHHBY) and Sanofi (SNY).

4. TRUMP CONTINUES PRESSURE ON FED: In a series of tweets on Friday morning, President Trump said, "Because of the faulty thought process we have going for us at the Federal Reserve, we pay much higher interest rates than countries that are no match for us economically [...] I like New York Fed President John Williams first statement much better than his second. His first statement is 100% correct in that the Fed 'raised' far too fast & too early. Also must stop with the crazy quantitative tightening [...] We are in a World competition, & winning big, but it is no thanks to the Federal Reserve. Had they not acted so fast and 'so much,' we would be doing even better than we are doing right now."

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