Are there any business winners in Trump 2?
No, definitely not Tesla
THE ROSE GARDEN is a bucolic place.
On April 2nd it was the scene of a massacre.
Just after 4 o’clock President Donald Trump walked out of the White House and swung a hammer at the global trading system.
He announced sweeping reciprocal tariffs against all of America’s biggest trading partners.
Companies around the world are scrambling to respond.
American ones have PTSD.
When in his inaugural address on January 20th Mr Trump promised that “the golden age of America begins right now,” the business world bought the glittering talk.
Bosses were counting on lower taxes, less red tape and buoyant American consumers.
Between election day in November and the swearing-in, the Russell 3000 index, which covers most of America’s public companies, rose by 5%.
The resulting $2.4trn in new shareholder value was equivalent to the entire Indian stockmarket with two Mexican bourses thrown in.
America was first.
No one came remotely close.
A month into Mr Trump’s second term America was even firster.
By February 19th the Russell 3000 had added another $1.4trn in market capitalisation, reaching a record $63trn.
Scott Bessent, a comfortingly buttoned-down hedge-fund billionaire, was in charge of the Treasury.
Another financier, Howard Lutnick, was installed as commerce secretary.
Elon Musk’s engineering genius would make the gummed-up bureaucracy run as efficiently as his Tesla assembly lines.
Could things get any sparklier?
It turns out they couldn’t.
In the past six weeks the sheen has come right off the Trump economy.
Mr Musk’s efficiency drive is gutting the federal workforce willy-nilly.
In February alone more than 62,000 government employees got the sack, according to a monthly tally by Challenger, a recruitment firm.
Private-sector employers, among them household names like Meta and John Deere, announced 110,000 job cuts, compared with 82,000 the year before.
Consumer sentiment is collapsing.
And instead of tax cuts America is now getting a giant hike in the form of tariffs.
Wall Street is on recession watch.
Even before the tariffs Goldman Sachs raised the odds of one from 20% to 35%.
On April 3rd Deutsche Bank said they “could easily knock” up to 1.5 percentage points off American GDP growth this year.
UBS thinks it could be two percentage points.
Businesses are feeling miserable.
When markets closed on April 2nd, two in three members of the Russell 3000 were worth less than they before his re-election.
When they reopen on April 3rd, after we published this, that ratio may rise.
A golden age?
For short-sellers, maybe, or for pedlars of gold.
What about anyone else?
Picking business winners is foolhardy—and foolish given how chaotic the second Trump administration was probably always going to be.
Schumpeter should know.
After the election he confidently predicted that American companies would outdo non-American ones and that, within America Inc, small firms would have a better time than corporate giants.
Investors are instead souring on America, and its corporate tiddlers in particular.
The Russell 2000 index of small companies lost 8% of its value between January and April 2nd, more than twice as much as the S&P 500, which tracks the biggest.
It also fell more sharply in post-tariff late trading.
The swooning stocks of small firms, whose fortunes are tied to the domestic economy, are pricing in a “pretty nasty” downturn, says Steven DeSanctis of Jefferies, another bank.
In contrast, share prices are still up this year in Europe (where policymakers want to stoke growth rather than extinguish it) and China (aflutter thanks to eye-catching domestic advances in artificial intelligence by DeepSeek and Manus).
Oops.
At the risk of again looking the fool, your columnist will offer two revised predictions and double down on a third.
First, things may be looking up for companies whose prospects seemed ho-hum.
A rudimentary analysis of Russell 3000 shares shows that the less a firm rode the Trump bump between election and inauguration, the likelier it was to withstand the Trump slump.
For example, of the 100 companies which lost the most in value between November 5th and February 19th, 72 were pharma and biotech firms.
The 100 biggest gainers counted just eight such firms.
Since February 19th there have been as many big biotech gainers as losers.
A couple, like 2seventy Bio, which is developing a therapy for blood cancer, leapt from the bottom 100 to the top.
The last shall be first
With all the attention on Mr Trump’s tariffs, health agencies have been less disruptive than pharma feared.
Big drugmakers, keen to replenish product pipelines, are in an acquisitive mood and likely to remain so even amid the trade uncertainty.
Two in five American mergers and acquisitions this year have involved health-care firms, notes Mr DeSanctis; on March 11th Bristol-Myers Squibb, an industry giant, said it was buying 2seventy Bio for $286m.
The second prediction is safer.
Tariffs won’t lead to a manufacturing renaissance.
But with Mr Trump, then Joe Biden and now Mr Trump again breathing down their necks about reshoring, bosses will bring more business home than they otherwise would.
Good news for those who help build domestic supply chains (such as Rockwell Automation, which makes industrial robots) or manage them (like Prologis, America’s biggest warehouse operator).
Your columnist still doubts they will win big—or at all.
Motorists everywhere are steering clear of Teslas.
Some deplore Mr Musk’s behaviour; others prefer better alternatives now on offer.
The carmaker’s market value has fallen to three-fifths of its peak in December.
That of the president’s own cash-burning social-media company, Trump Media and Technology Group, is down by half since he declared the new golden age.
As he impoverishes the American people, it is only fair that he feels some of the same pain.
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