Infrastructure week is finally here, though Wall Street is looking toward the future.
Four years after former President Donald Trump championed revitalizing America’s roads and bridges, a vision that never materialized despite widespread support, President Joe Biden appears to be on the precipice of doing just that.
A major bipartisan package tallying more than 2,700 pages and $550 billion in new spending is expected to pass the Senate in the coming days before heading to the House of Representatives. And while Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has indicated that the bill will not go up for a vote in the lower chamber until the upcoming budget reconciliation package is put forward—as it is expected to tackle many parts of the Biden administration’s “human infrastructure” ambitions—the bill’s advancement will represent the growing possibility of billions of federal dollars being doled out to improve the country’s decaying physical infrastructure.
Under the bipartisan plan, the $550 billion will be allocated for improving roads and bridges across the country, updating the electrical grid, and building out a more expansive broadband network. Other areas of investment included in the bill’s structure include drinking water projects, railroads, airports, ports, and waterways. As a result, companies selling products from concrete to construction equipment to electric vehicles all stand to benefit.
However, Wall Street investors, ever the soothsayers, have largely already priced in the bill’s effects.
The S&P Global Infrastructure Index, a benchmark that tracks 75 global companies that help make up the infrastructure industry, has ticked higher only by 0.4% in recent days. In fact, big-name companies with exposure to the bill’s investments showed little reaction to its introduction Monday. Shares in both Caterpillar and Deere, for instance, fell in trading. “There are some clear investable themes in the bipartisan framework that certain investors have sunk their teeth in” already, Isaac Boltansky, director of policy research for Compass Point, told Fortune.
But that’s not to say the infrastructure bill’s resulting investment opportunities have completely dried up. For companies like Jacobs Engineering Group, Hubbell, and Honeywell, there is still more room to run, according to Morningstar chief U.S. market strategist Dave Sekera. Others with exposure to the electric-vehicle market—including carmakers like Ford, renewable energy company Edison International, and, of course, Tesla—could all benefit as well. The infrastructure package allocates $7.5 billion to create an electric-vehicle charging station network around the country.
“Of what I consider to be the traditional infrastructure [companies], I think most of those have already moved higher. So in most cases, we think that those are, at best, fairly valued and most of them, at worst, overvalued,” Sekera told Fortune. “To find value in the traditional space, we’re looking to the secondary impacts.”
For some Democrats on Capitol Hill, the bipartisan bill does not go far enough without consideration for the party’s $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation plans, which is expected to tackle the administration’s broader infrastructure ambitions around child care costs, education, and national paid leave. Said New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during a CNN interview on Sunday, “If the Senate does not pass the reconciliation bill, we will uphold our end of the bargain and not pass the bipartisan bill until we get all of these investments in.”
With Pelosi and other Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez focused on getting the reconciliation bill done at the same time that Capitol Hill wrestles with the Treasury Department’s debt ceiling, much of Wall Street seems to be focused on the next package.
“By and large, most investors are focused on the reconciliation package that is set to follow in conjunction with what I think could be a frenetic and headline-driven period in Washington,” Compass Point’s Boltansky said. “There is a confluence of political risk emanating from the Capitol beginning in September, and that’s going to be one of the driving storylines for investors.”
Correction, August 13, 2021: A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Morningstar chief U.S. market strategist Dave Sekera.
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