One year after Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders first hinted, on Twitter, that one of the main targets of their campaigns would be pharma and biotech companies in general, and high drug prices in particular, today as part of his extensive interview with Time, the President-elect, and the magazine's winner of the "Person of the Year" award for 2016 hinted that he, too, would focus on high drug prices.
As Time writes, Trump "suggests that some stock analysts may have misread his intentions. The value of biotechnology stocks, for example, which enjoy large profit margins under current law, rose 9% in the day after Trump’s election, a rally of relief that the price controls Clinton had proposed would not happen. But Trump says his goal has not wavered. “I’m going to bring down drug prices,” he says. “I don’t like what has happened with drug prices.”
Among other notable items discussed in the interview is Trump's immigration philosophy, as well his insistence that Russia had nothing to do with his winning the election:
A year from now, when Trump travels to the U.N. to address the world’s leaders, he is likely to find far more sympathy for this hard-edged populism than any thought possible in 2008. Trump is all but rooting for it. “People are proud of their countries, and I think you will see nationalism,” he says, before describing the growing backlash against Muslim migration in France, Belgium and Germany. “A lot of people reject some of the ideas that are being forced on them. And that’s certainly one of the reasons you had this vote, having to do not with the European Union but the same thing.”
In this view, Trump will find common cause with Vladimir Putin, the authoritarian President of Russia who, like Trump, seeks to challenge diplomatic and democratic norms. For reasons that remain unclear, Trump still refuses to acknowledge the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Putin’s agencies were responsible for stealing the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails released on WikiLeaks. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe they interfered,” Trump says. Asked if he thought the conclusion of America’s spies was politically driven, Trump says, “I think so.” Since the election, Trump has chosen not to consistently make himself available for intelligence briefings, say aides.
That, however, is largely irrelevant for the markets, which instead are focusing on Trump's comments on drug prices, which as a result have slid in premarket trading, and a NBI ETF is now down almost 2%.