The speculation is over.
With Joe Biden’s announcement of his vice president pick, Kamala Harris, investors now have a clear picture of the Democratic ticket for 2020. And according to Wells Fargo Investment Institute’s senior global market strategist Sameer Samana, that’s helped take a little tail risk off the table.
“If [Biden] had gone with, let’s say, an Elizabeth Warren, who would have been viewed as much more, call it, ‘anti-financials’ [and] a little bit more on the regulatory front, that would have been seen as a negative,” he tells Fortune. “What the Harris pick does is it maybe trims the tail just a little bit in terms of, ‘Now that we know it’s Harris, and we know it’s not someone who was anchoring the progressive wing of the party, some of that tail risk has been removed.’”
While Harris’s appointment as running mate does put to bed the possibility of a far more progressive ticket, in general, “vice presidential candidates rarely have a significant impact on financial markets,” UBS Global Wealth Management’s head of Americas fixed income Thomas McLoughlin wrote in a note Tuesday. “We do not expect the U.S. equity or fixed-income markets to react abruptly to the selection because the choice was adequately telegraphed as a real possibility for weeks,” he writes.
But that doesn’t mean investors aren’t pondering what a Biden-Harris administration might look like—and which industries might be most sensitive to the duo’s proposed policies.
For months analysts have been positing what Biden may mean for stocks (JPMorgan, for one, suggested he could be a positive for markets). But perhaps the headline concern for those on Wall Street (and corporate America) is Biden’s resolve to raise corporate taxes.
Yet analysts at JPMorgan wrote in July that the “headline risk might be greater than actual policy,” and Samana concedes a massive tax hike is unlikely to happen (at least anytime soon) “while there’s still an overall sluggishness to the economy.”
Some industries that might actually be impacted by a Biden-Harris ticket, though, include pharmaceuticals. At this point, Medicare for All is pretty much off the table, but President Trump’s fight to lower drug prices will likely be carried on by a President Biden, Samana suggests, meaning potential headwinds for Big Pharma.
Meanwhile, although tech has been a hot-button industry as of late, with continued calls for more crackdowns on privacy and regulation, Biden’s choice in Harris might actually be good for Big Tech. As Fortune‘s Jeff Roberts recently reported, with Harris’s ties to Silicon Valley and seemingly toothless calls to break up tech, “Harris is infinitely preferable to the tech industry than Biden’s other choices, as well as the Trump administration, which has attacked Silicon Valley relentlessly,” Roberts writes.
Samana also notes a Biden-Harris presidency would mean “a pendulum swing back a little bit more toward the progressive side” and points out energy and environment-sensitive industries would likely be in the crosshairs. “If you’re an old-school energy company, things are probably only going to get harder for you. If you’re more oriented toward solar, wind, or electric vehicles, then you could see how government policies kind of tilt in your favor,” he notes.
Indeed, analysts at JPMorgan wrote in July that stocks like Tesla, Nikola, and FirstSolar are poised to be outperformers during a Democratic reign, while oil and gas producers like Apache and Pioneer Natural Resources may underperform.
Meanwhile, raising minimum wage to $15 per hour (an item long on Biden’s platform) could be a negative in the eyes of Wall Street, Samana suggests, as it could mean a “hit [to] corporate profitability” that “would possibly spook financial markets.” And while analysts at JPMorgan wrote a higher minimum wage might be a “neutral to positive” for S&P 500 companies, especially health care and tech, it “could create additional stress between companies that are able to absorb higher wages vs. those with lower pricing power/scale,” with stocks like Macy’s, Marriott International, and Kroger likely to lag. But on the flip side, Samana points out a hike in wages could also “be offset by greater consumer confidence and consumption.”
While it remains to be seen how campaign promises and policies actually shake out (and how they might impact investors), strategists like Samana note the finalized ticket “continues the understanding that a President Biden would be kind of a return to the political norms that existed prior to a Trump presidency,” he suggests. “The Harris pick further cements that.”
