Moshe Schwartz, President at Etherton and Associates, and Margaret Boatner, Vice President for National Security Policy at Aerospace Industries Association, join Double Take to unpack what’s at stake as defense right-to-repair proposals test IP protections, raise costs and create new risks for investors.

U.S. Defense Stakes

Double Take By BNY Investments Newton

Welcome, Double Takers. Always a pleasure to bring you what we hope is another fascinating conversation with subject matter experts on the hot topic du jour. I'm Rafe Lewis, Head of Specialist Research at BNY Investments, and with me, as always, is investigative research analyst Jack Encarnacio. So, almost from the day Donald Trump came back into office in January 2025, defense stocks went on a tear. Just look at the charts for companies like RTX or Lockheed Martin.

Divining why stocks move in any given direction is, of course, more art than science quite often. But suffice to say, with Trump back in the Oval Office, investors saw an American executive hungry to increase America's firepower, footprint, and foreign weapons sales. Yeah, that's right, Rafe. And you could say the bullish fervor hit a zenith when President Trump, a few months back, made a push to increase U.S. defense spending by more than 50% year over year,

all while launching attacks, wars, or wars of wars with places like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and more. But then the music kind of stopped. Back to Rafe's point on divining stock movements. Who can really say why? But if we at BNY Investments had to make a guess, it was the increasing realization that the president's lofty hopes for a ginormous increase in defense spending would not happen to the level he'd hoped. But perhaps more salient, we believe, is this.

Congress has been seriously flirting with a bill that would fundamentally alter the defense industry's relationship with Uncle Sam, giving the government the ability to take a given contractor's intellectual property and, in certain circumstances, hand it to another company of its choosing. Yes. So the Pentagon and government watchdog groups supporting this measure call this legislation a, quote, right-to-repair law,

U.S. Defense Stakes

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

U.S. Defense Stakes

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.