The corporate winners and losers under Trump

0:00Derek Brower: Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Washington Wise is an original podcast from Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington right now and how they may affect your finances and portfolio. Listen at Schwab dot com slash Washington Wise.

0:23Gregory Meyer: If you were going to put some money on which companies stood to gain the most from a Trump presidency, you probably would have done things a little differently every month he's been in office so far. In January, you might have bet on oil. Today, I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill. In March, maybe something crypto related.

0:49Derek Brower: The latest from Truth Social from the president saying a U.S. crypto reserve will elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks by the Biden administration, which is why.

0:59Gregory Meyer: And in April, you might have sold shares in just about any of those companies.

1:04Derek Brower: This is Liberation Day, waiting for a long time.

1:10Gregory Meyer: April 2nd, 2025 will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America's destiny. But as it turns out, there actually are some pretty clear answers about which industries have stood to gain over the last six months. The FT poured over data on the largest global corporations to figure out who's winning and who's losing in President Trump's economy.

1:42Gregory Meyer: This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the Financial Times, where we talk about all of the things happening in U.S. politics, finance and the economy. I'm Sonia Hudson. And this week we're asking, who are the corporate winners and losers of Trump's presidency? Here with me to discuss is Derek Brower. He's the FT's U.S. News Editor. Hi, Derek. Hi, Sonia. And we've also got Greg Meyer, the FT's U.S. Consumer Editor. Hi, Greg. Hello. So, Derek, why did you decide to start this project and what were you expecting to find? Well, there's been so much volatility in global markets since Trump entered office.

2:24Gregory Meyer: And we wanted to show it and find out which companies have done best, which have done worst. I think we were expecting to find that maybe the fossil fuel producers that Trump touted during his election campaign, or the crypto companies or the arms companies, the weapons manufacturers would all do best. And in some cases, we found evidence of that, although not in all cases. And there were some surprises in there. Yeah. So tell me about some of the surprises. What did you find in terms of the winners? Yeah, I guess the top line is that European defense companies doing well, some Chinese companies doing reasonably well.

3:08Gregory Meyer: So this whole idea that we, I think, started with was Donald Trump would be great for the American economy, or that was what he purported to be doing, and that this would reflect itself in the performance of American companies didn't actually turn out to be that accurate. That's interesting. Now, I do want to dive into some of the specifics here. But before we do that, Greg, how did you measure success here? Like, what constitutes a winner?

3:37Derek Brower: Well, that's a really important question. I mean, for this particular project that we're discussing, being a winner or loser was measured solely by their stock market performance, by their percentage change in their stock price, or relatedly, the rise and fall of their market capitalization since Trump's inauguration in late January.

3:59Gregory Meyer: So, Derek, you mentioned earlier that European defense companies were one of the big winners that you found in this analysis. What's an example of a company that has directly benefited from Trump's presidency? Ryan Metall. That's Germany's largest weapons manufacturer. It's one of the companies. Saab is another one that's another big weapons manufacturer. I mean, these are companies that have been kind of sleeper companies in Europe for a long time, plugging away, making European weapons. And all of a sudden across Europe, there's all this anxiety that the U.S. is no longer going to be the shield for European countries in the face of Russia.

4:37Gregory Meyer: They're not going to be providing the weapons for Ukraine. The U.S. may be less committed to NATO than in the past. And Europeans have responded, European politicians, in particular Germany, have responded by saying, okay, we're going to build this stuff at home. And that's been very good for domestic, i.e. European domestic weapons manufacturers. Greg, are there any other examples of winners that stood out to you?

5:02Derek Brower: The cryptocurrency sector has clearly been a winner. I mean, under the Biden administration, SEC chair Gary Gensler, in particular, was taking a very, very tough line on crypto.

5:15Gregory Meyer: Yeah, he kind of became public enemy number one to a lot of these crypto companies.

5:19Derek Brower: Yeah, and had filed lawsuits against several of the operators, including Coinbase, which is a big listed crypto trading platform. Coinbase since has, their shares have done very well this year, reflecting the Trump administration's warm embrace of crypto. I mean, so warm, in fact, that Donald Trump and Mania Trump have launched meme coins in their own name. Two names that caught my eye were on the list of winners were Capital One, which is the big credit card lender and auto lender. They had actually been sued by the Trump Organization for terminating hundreds of bank accounts after the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S.

5:59Derek Brower: capital by Trump supporters. But in fact, the Trump administration has been good for the lender and the approved Capital One's takeover of the credit card company Discover Financial, which is the first major bank merger in more than five years. And also interesting to me, the core of my beauty is the retail sector, is Dollar General, which is the largest dollar store chain. Dollar General's business has strengthened in the past quarter, probably through their own internal turnaround efforts. But interestingly, they also noted that more affluent customers have been trading down and shopping at Dollar General to escape inflation.

6:36Gregory Meyer: So that's one of those cases where the fact that Dollar General is doing well is actually not a good sign for the economy.

6:43Derek Brower: Yeah. When Dollar General does well, it's not necessarily a sign that households are doing well because they're a discount operator.

6:53Gregory Meyer: Yeah. So, you know, we just went through some of the biggest winners of the Trump presidency so far. And so I think it's time we should transition to the losers. Derek, who are they? Well, in the US, it's companies that are exposed to the tariffs. In market cap terms, that's hundreds of billions of dollars lost for companies like Apple, the big names. Apple makes most of its phones, almost all of its phones in China. Trump launched a trade war against China. That's pretty obvious and easy to understand. But there's other companies. There's pharma companies that have been hit as well. And then you go down to the list and you see the obvious ones like energy.

7:34Gregory Meyer: Oil prices are down. It's not strictly related to Trump, but it is a bit because his policies are all designed to bring the price of fossil fuels down. So if you produce fossil fuels, that makes you less profitable. Yeah. Derek, tell me a little bit more about the energy sector and who's suffering there. Is it across the board? Is it both oil companies and green energy developers? It kind of is. And this is what's fascinating is that under Biden, the fossil fuel industry was very angry about his policies and the restrictions that they perceived on drilling and controls on pollution and so on. And they all, or not all of them, but many of them helped bankroll Trump's campaign last year because Trump was promising, in his words, to unleash American energy and drill baby drill and allow all this to happen and to scrap subsidies for clean energy that oil bosses thought might be affecting them.

8:33Gregory Meyer: And now that Trump's in, whose policies are definitely very, very lenient towards oil and gas producers and very punitive to clean energy producers, everybody's doing pretty badly. Some of the big shale producers, shale oil and gas producers that were doing well under Biden are now among the weaker performers on the S &P 500 and in our list, like Occidental Petroleum. Some of the solar panel installers and manufacturers who were hoping to do a lot better thanks to Joe Biden's subsidies through the Inflation Reduction Act. Now they're being hammered because Trump is rolling back the tax credits and subsidies that were in the Inflation Reduction Act.

9:15Gregory Meyer: And he's doing that through his big, beautiful bill, which it's a deliberate unwinding of all this clean energy legislation that Biden successfully enacted. Yeah, it's interesting. You would kind of expect a president to favor one and not the other, and you would have them have opposite fates. It's interesting that they're both kind of suffering. Greg, back to you. What's a company that stood out to you that's felt the brunt of Trump's policies and has been suffering?

9:48Derek Brower: One of them, and the one that tops our list of losers by their share decline, is Decker's Outdoor. probably not a name that most consumers will know, but they will know the shoes they make, which are Uggs boots and Hoka running shoes. Definitely know those. Yes. Much of the global shoe supply chain is based in Southeast Asia. Vietnam in particular is the heart of that industry. When Trump initially announced reciprocal tariffs on April, well, announced in early April, and they took effect a week later and then were suspended. But they were, I think, 46 % on Vietnam, which would have just been crushing for any of these shoe manufacturers.

10:33Derek Brower: So Decker's, in its case, they pulled their full-year outlook because of uncertainty over global trade. The last time they updated investors, it was like up to$150 million increase in cost of goods sold because of tariffs.

10:46Gregory Meyer: Wow.

10:46Derek Brower: Again, the tariffs are in flux. And July 9th is when the reciprocal tariffs. suspension is supposed to end. So, you know, time will tell, but that was an interesting one.

10:59Gregory Meyer: Greg, Derek, with all this in mind, with all these winners and losers that we've just talked about, what is the big takeaway here about Donald Trump's impact on the business space? I think the big takeaway is just how much risk now emanates directly from the Oval Office, because many of these companies were expecting some kind of tariff regime. They were expecting something a bit more predictable than what happened, though. And as soon as they got on top of the tariffs, Trump was reducing the headline numbers and striking trade deals. And so it's very, very difficult if you're building a business to figure out what you're going to be paying to import the raw materials.

11:44Gregory Meyer: You don't know whether there's going to be a tariff on Canadian steel in a year. Realistically, you simply don't. But that is a key input for some of those energy companies, for example, that we were talking about. They have no idea. Trump could strike a deal with Mark Carney or announce one on True Social tomorrow morning, and then there are no steel tariffs. Or you could double them. There is simply no predictability about that. Greg, what's the big takeaway for you?

12:08Derek Brower: I think related to what Derek said is not only is it difficult to manage the very unpredictable policy environment, but it's also a very personalized way of policymaking. A company might tell investors that they're going to raise prices because of tariffs, as Walmart did on May 15th in the earnings. And two days later, they might wake up to a post on Truth Social by the president saying, Walmart shouldn't do this. They must eat the tariffs, quote unquote. Well, all I'm trying to say is it's the leaders of these companies, I'm sure, are very aware of the risk of being singled out. The other thing I would say, Sonia, is the big, beautiful bill.

12:52Gregory Meyer: And what's really striking when you step back and look at some of the changes that have been made in that bill, of course, it preserves tax cuts. Fine. I think everybody expected that. Yeah, that was always going to happen. Yeah, that was always going to happen. But in the way that Trump has very carefully unpicked the Inflation Reduction Act in just six months is pretty astonishing. Because a lot of investors came to the U.S. after the Inflation Reduction Act was passed because they believed those tax credits were going to last for at least 10 years and were safe from exactly what Trump has done happening.

13:30Gregory Meyer: They believe that these tax credits could not be simply repealed by the next president so easily. And actually, he's done it in just a few months. And so it just makes the U.S. suddenly a much riskier place to invest. And he's done it in just a few short months. All right. I think we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to answer some listener questions.

14:26Gregory Meyer: We are back to answer some of your questions. questions. Derek, Greg, I am going to ask you a question that has been sent in by a Swamp Notes listener, and I'm going to ask you to answer it as best you can. This one comes from Bettina, writing in from Germany. Can Donald Trump's influence be bought by expensive gifts or investment in his meme coins and family business? I think there's two answers to this. Donald Trump and his family would say, and indeed they did say, Eric Trump said in a recent interview with us, that there has never been a more above board family in the way they deal with things than the Trump family.

15:08The other answer to this would be, if it's not influencing him,

15:14Gregory Meyer: people certainly seem to be trying. Purchasing Donald Trump's meme coin and trying to get dinner with him seems to be a way to be close to the president. And of course, Donald Trump himself, as we and others have reported, offered to make many concessions on policy to people who donated to his presidential campaign last year. So I think there are many ways, even if Donald Trump is not able to be bought, and I'm not weighing in on that, really. I'm just saying what he might say in response. I think people are certainly trying. If you have a question about U.S. politics and the global economy, send us a voice memo to the email in the show notes, and we might play it on the show.

16:08Gregory Meyer: I want to thank our guest, Derek Brower, the FT's U.S. News Editor. Thanks, Derek. Thank you. And Greg Meyer. He's our U.S. Consumer Editor. Thanks, Greg.

16:18Derek Brower: Thanks very much.

16:20Gregory Meyer: Also, a big thank you to the dozens of FT correspondents who helped put together the full analysis of corporate winners and losers. We'll have a link to their reporting in the show notes. Go check it out.

16:41Gregory Meyer: This was Swamp Notes, the U.S. politics show from the FT. If you want to sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we've got a link to that in the show notes. Our show is mixed by Sam Giavinko and produced by Henry Larson. We had help this week from Lauren Fedor and special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. I'm Sonia Hudson. Our acting co-head of audio is Topher Forges. Original music by Hannes Brown. Check back next week for more U.S. political analysis from the Financial Times.

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