Trump is about ready to put a big beautiful tariff on pharmaceutical drugs, as our country no longer makes them.
He says when war is coming the country will need steel and drugs and he is making sure we are ready for that.
This will also hurt drug companies and increase prices for drugs. I have been reading it will take several years for all this manufacturing to return to the US. If this tariff stuff does not work itself out soon, the midterm elections will be bad for the GOP.
In the way this is heading, Trump will decimate support for republicans. People always vote their wallets. Trump had promised lower prices, and looks like people will be getting higher prices for many things.
And we could be found right back into democratic control, and we know that is also bad. Right now, Trump is looking to become a boon for democrats. Many regular Americans own stocks, when they drop like this people feel poor and they stop consuming. Businesses stop expanding, hiring drops, economy goes into recession. Once you break markets, it takes a while to restore confidences. We are in a bear stock market. It can last a year and a half. Or the tariffs issue could be quickly resolved and the dire circumstances avoided.
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President Donald Trump said his long-promised tariffs on pharmaceutical drugs will be coming soon, the latest signal that he plans to press ahead with more sectoral tariffs despite market fallout from his global levies.
“We are going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals,” Trump said Tuesday at a fundraising gala for House Republicans, without providing details on the planned levy.
“Once we do that, they’re going to come rushing back into our country, because we’re the big market,” Trump said. “The advantage we have over everybody is that we’re the big market.”
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Trump has long bemoaned a lack of domestic pharmaceutical production and has repeatedly promised tariffs to bring more capacity into the country.
An index of European health care companies dropped to a two-and-a-half-year low on Wednesday, with shares in AstraZeneca Plc, Novo Nordisk A/S and Roche Holding AG falling around 7% before paring losses.
A lack of information about the place of manufacturing of drug components makes any assessment of the impact of potential tariffs challenging, analysts John Murphy and Sam Fazeli from Bloomberg Intelligence said in a note. But companies with the lowest gross margins could face the biggest adverse earnings impact, they said, pointing to Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Pfizer Inc. and Sanofi SA.
Trump’s administration has signaled that they’ll use so-called section 232 powers to enact the levies, though they haven’t launched the prerequisite investigation. “We’ll be announcing pharmaceuticals at some point in the not too distant future,” Trump said on March 24. “We don’t make pharmaceuticals anymore and if we have problems like wars or anything else, we need steel, we need pharmaceuticals.”
Trump has already applied 25% sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum and automobiles, while launching the process to also enact them on copper. In addition to pharmaceuticals, his administration has separately pledged additional sectoral levies including on lumber and semiconductor chips, though timing and details are unclear.
Trump’s sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs announced last week, which have sapped trillions in value from American markets, exempted sectors that either already have, or may soon have, their own levies.
