Price Gouging Debate Hits Biotech Stocks – Markets This Morning

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Stocks started strong and finished OK, with some notable exceptions.

In Germany, the exception was Volkswagen (OTC:VLKAY), which lost 20% of its value after admitting it had used software to make its dirty diesel engines appear to be environmentally-friendly. Car blog Jalopnikwrote, simply, “Volkswagen is screwed” and no one came to defend the company, which faces billions of dollars in fines and a huge hit to its corporate credibility. Despite this, the German DAX managed a gain of .04% on the day.

In the U.S. biotech sector, a new company called Turing Pharmaceuticals bought a company called Impax, then raised the price of its 60-year old Daraprim medication, used to fight taxoplasmosis, from $13.50 a tablet to $750.

Turing CEO Martin Shkreli, a former hedge fund manager, defended his decision  based on the money he had spent buying Impax, but the anti-consumer attitude went viral, to the point where Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton sent a tweet promising to do something about such “price gouging.”

Mrs. Clinton, not the price gouging, was blamed by the business media for the subsequent fall in biotech stocks, with the iShares Biotech ETF (NASDAQ:IBB) falling 4.48% to $340.78. Major components in the index also fell heavily, including Valeant (NYSE:VRX), down 5.29% to $229,Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ:GILD), down 2.49% to $105.74, and Bristol Myers Squibb (NYSE:BMY), down 2.53% to $62.71.

Other Than That the Play Was OK

Other than that it was a good day. The Dow Jones (INDEX:DJI) finished up .77%, 125.61, to 16,510. The S&P 500 (INDEX:SPX) finished up .46% or 8.94 to 1,966, and the Nasdaq (INDEX:COMP) finished up .04%, or 1.73, to finish at 4,829. It followed a fairly good day on global markets, with Shanghai rising 1.86%, and the French CAC-40 rising 1.09%. The gains were not uniform – Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index dropped .75%, the Japanese Nikkei went down 1.96%, and Brazil’s Bovespa resumed its slide, losing 4.04%.