Week In Review: How Trump's Policies Moved Stocks - Sunday, Oct. 1

Catch up on the top industries and stocks that were impacted, or were predicted to be impacted, by the comments, actions and policies of President Trump and his administration with this weekly recap compiled by The Fly:

1. FACEBOOK: On Wednesday, President Donald Trump tweeted: "Facebook [FB] was always anti-Trump.The Networks were always anti-Trump hence,Fake News, @nytimes(apologized) & @wapo were anti-Trump. Collusion?" Later that day, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to President Trump's tweet, by saying: "Every day I work to bring people together and build a community for everyone. We hope to give all people a voice and create a platform for all ideas. Trump says Facebook is against him. Liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don't like. That's what running a platform for all ideas looks like. The facts suggest the greatest role Facebook played in the 2016 election was different from what most are saying: More people had a voice in this election than ever before. There were billions of interactions discussing the issues that may have never happened offline. Every topic was discussed, not just what the media covered. This was the first US election where the internet was a primary way candidates communicated. Every candidate had a Facebook page to communicate directly with tens of millions of followers every day. After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea. Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive. But the data we have has always shown that our broader impact -- from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote -- played a far bigger role in this election. We will continue to work to build a community for all people. We will do our part to defend against nation states attempting to spread misinformation and subvert elections. We'll keep working to ensure the integrity of free and fair elections around the world, and to ensure our community is a platform for all ideas and force for good in democracy."

2. RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE: U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, Republican representative from Texas, has sent letters to the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter (TWTR), and Alphabet (GOOG) requesting documents and information related to Russian entities purchasing anti-fracking and anti-fossil fuel advertisements on the platforms. The letters are part of the committee's ongoing oversight of efforts to manipulate the U.S. energy market. On Thursday, Twitter offered its first public information on Russian use of its platform during the U.S. presidential election, according to The Wall Street Journal. However, its limited disclosure fueled criticism from lawmakers who are pushing for greater transparency from internet companies over how their platforms are manipulated, the publication added. Twitter said it found 201 accounts on its service linked to Russian actors that Facebook recently identified as having run ads meant to sow political and social division, and said the Russian-backed news site RT bought $274,100 of ads last year, the report noted.

3. HEALTHCARE: On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican senators agreed not to vote on the Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill. A day later, President Trump said to reporters that his healthcare reform bill will have the votes in January, February or March as one of the "yes" votes is in the hospital and two others will be coming. Trump added that he will, in the meantime, meet with Democrats to see if he can come up with an "even better" healthcare bill. The President noted that he'll be signing an executive order on healthcare next week. On Friday, Health Secretary Tom Price resigned amid investigations into his use of costly charter flights for official travel at taxpayer expense. Publicly traded companies in the insurance space include Aetna (AET), Anthem (ANTM), Centene (CNC), Cigna (CI), Health Net (HNT), Humana (HUM), Molina Healthcare (MOH), UnitedHealth (UNH) and WellCare (WCG).

"Week in Review" is The Fly's weekly recap of its recurring series of "Trump Effect" exclusive stories.
 

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