Prediction: 3 of Wall Street's Most Influential Stocks Can Plunge if Kamala Harris Wins in November

1 week ago

Four weeks from today, on Nov. 5, voters will determine which direction our great country takes over the next four years.

Although not every bill that comes out of Washington, D.C., has bearing on the stock market, the economic proposals that are, ultimately, put into place by the incoming president and Congress will help shape the landscape for corporate America in the coming years.

Kamala Harris delivering remarks. Image source: Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz.

Current vice president and Democratic Party presidential nominee Kamala Harris has proposed sweeping changes designed to lower food and drug costs, expand a variety of tax credits for middle-class families, and wants to reduce the federal deficit by raising the corporate tax rate by 33%.

While some businesses would likely thrive with Harris in the White House, other high-flying companies may struggle.

What follows are three of Wall Street's most-influential stocks that can plunge if Kamala Harris wins in November.

Meta Platforms

The first highly influential business that could find the going tough if Harris proves victorious in November is social media colossus Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META), the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, among other social sites.

Meta sits atop the pedestal when it comes to social media websites. For the June-ended quarter, it attracted 3.27 billion daily active users across its family apps. No other social platform comes close to generating this level of daily visits, which is what provides Meta with exceptional ad-pricing power more often than not.

The concern for Meta is the potential for Harris and her administration to go after monopoly like businesses. In an interview with CNN while running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, Harris suggested that she wanted to "take a serious look" at breaking up the company, and alluded that Meta (formerly known as Facebook) was "essentially a utility that has gone unregulated."

Admittedly, the political views of elected officials can and do change over time. It's not clear if Harris still believes that Mark Zuckerberg's company is in need of stronger regulations designed to protect consumer privacy interests. Nevertheless, her remarks from 2019 signal the very real possibility of pitting the Harris administration against some of Wall Street's most dominant companies.

The other reason Meta Platforms might struggle if Harris wins in November is her aforementioned plan to raise the corporate tax rate by a third -- from 21% to 28%. Even though Meta is quite profitable from its advertising operations, a higher tax rate would expose the widening losses it's contending with from its Reality Labs segment. This is the operating division focused on augmented/virtual reality devices and the company's metaverse ambitions, among other projects.

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