News May 9, 2019 at 2:50 pm

Comments

1

Surprised Charles hasn’t written about the state owned airline crashing a state-made plane, Aeroflot’s Sukhoi Superjet 100, and how that affects the role of the state in building jets.

2

Well, they're maneuvering their former exec into position to sign off on the air force purchase of their subpar tankers...

3

The turning point for Boeing was when the fathead fuckwit execs, with their cartoonish distaste for union scum, packed up from their manufacturing base and moved to Chicago, just to avoid them.

Then they put a big manufacturing center in union-hostile, low-skill bumfuck jeebusland South Carolina where marginally literate good ol’ boys slap planes together, poorly. One major airline has negotiated that they will NOT take Boeing planes built by moron non-union trailer trash.

4

3
so true.
in fact those hick planes are nosediving out of the sky.
or not...

Chuck keeps gleefully waiting for Boeing to tank the US economy;
we suspect the damage, massive as it will be, will stick in the PNW

5

Charles, thank you as always.

6

Obviously Capitalism will fail and we will all live in a Socialist utopia... because of Boeing

7

This week on "What will Crash the Stock Market (and End Captialsim, This Time I Promise)" with Charles Mudede:

Charlie will not let go of his aeroplanes. Charlie clutches his toy aeroplanes in his wee little fists, eyes brimming with tears. "NO!" Charlie shouts. "NO NO NO NO NO!" he adds, lip trembling.

8

@7: Follow the money!

Not crash, but churn: What Charles is intending to do (rather poorly as usual) is cause a couple point temporary drop on BA stock to buy in. He's doing it as poorly as the orange carrot-demon sanctioning Chinese imports, causing ALL stocks to churn, making someone hedgefund manager big $.

But will Charles show us his 2019 tax returns?

9

Nothing that spooky about S&P rating the Boeing bonds; there aren't that many rating agencies around, and they all fucked up pre-2008. An 'A' rating isn't that hot, but being half of a duopoly doesn't hurt your credit rating.

Norwegian is in trouble on a few fronts. Their long-haul fleet is all 787s, and their RR engines have a slight problem with premature metal fatigue in their fan blades. Norwegian is collecting compensation from RR for that, too. It also doesn't help that Norwegian is leveraged to the eyeballs on account of all their new equipment purchases.

Are you shorting Boeing stock, Charles? I think we should be told.

10

I'm not a finance guy, but doesn't the many-thousands-of-airplanes sized backlog that Boeing has on its books go some way to retaining the A-rating? Even assuming MAX'es never fly again, that's still a hella pile of money coming down the pike.

11

Ummm...No.

Not even a little bit.

This isn't advice to buy Boeing stock. And I guess it's possible that Boeing's troubles could intensify, but even with earnings down 18% from 2018 they still made $2.4B in the first quarter of 2019. They're bonds have a high rating because there's almost not chance of them defaulting. As long as they keep posting earnings, they won't have a problem issuing new bonds to pay off old ones. And that's probably pretty close to a worse case scenario.

12

@9: “Are you shorting Boeing stock, Charles? I think we should be told.”

His Chicken Little schtick has become more tightly focused on Boeing, has it not? And now he’s openly complaining Boeing’s stock price remains too high. Perhaps Charles actually believed his own rhetoric enough to take a short position on Boeing. Or perhaps, as mentioned @8, he just wants to buy in. If he has any position (or intent to have one) in Boeing, he should disclose.

(Yes, I wrote that with the full knowledge that using the term “journalistic ethics” around here really puts the oxy into moron...)

13

The very thought of Our Bumbling Mudede calling up a broker, or better yet pecking orders into TD Ameritrade on his iPhone, has me in stitches.

Well done, peanut gallery.

14

But the share-holders aren't homeless , no? --- corporatewelfare.org #CorporateWelfare & CTJ.Org .

16

3

once upon a time there were these people that could take a boat anywhere in the world, and a single fucking boat would stand against the combined might of any single fucking place at all.

They were quite classy, I’m sure.

The pretty linguist was important, too.

Did Boeing fuck up? Sure.

Would I read or translate the manual for the new version?

Yes.

If it comes to it some filthy rich old geezer would prop Boeing up.

It won’t come to that.

17

sigh

Once again, I'll have to get up early tomorrow to see if capitalism is still here.

18

Boeing isn't broke. Far from it. BA is volatile but that's to be expected given the issues. And they got plenty of issues. But being "broke" isn't one of them.

19

As long as we have the military welfare complex Boeing will be fine.

But I don't understand why Our Dear Charles is rooting for the failure of the largest blue collar, unionized, manufacturing company in the state. The wages that Boeing pays help build the light rail he is always droning on about. Boeing's corporate donations and employee wages go a long way toward providing the "vibrant" arts community he enjoys.

Some of us remember when Boeing laid off 2/3 of their workforce. It was a disaster for Seattle, and caused widespread misery for thousands of families. On the plus side, it did create a fleeting period of low rents and low house prices that allowed slackers like me to live fairly well in my 20's.

I under no allusions that Boeing is an honorable company, and it's only gotten worse, as Our Dear Karlheinz Arschbomber points out, since their spoiled and vain upper management decamped for Chicago. But WA state's fortunes are tied to Boeing. There's no way around that. Boeing's Long Goodbye to the Puget Sound, which I believe is underway, is the best possible way for us to transition.

20

Charles, Boeing’s stock was stuck at around $70 early in this decade because of the 787, which had been under development since 2003, was supposed to carry passengers in 2008, but did not receive FAA certification until late 2011. Then it was grounded for battery issues in 2012.

@13: Please, dear: in the post, Charles already claimed to be an intrepid detective of suspect corporate financing: “...and if I'm right, the cash for the buybacks in the second half of the decade was mostly borrowed.”

Nothing the rest of us write could ever possibly top that.

21

“As long as we have the military welfare complex Boeing will be fine.”

Oh dear I guess you didn’t hear, that boeing’s commercial division has been subsidizing it’s defense division for years. It’s an old story, that even NPR covered just this week. But keep prattling on like a sophomore year Poli Sci major.

22

Ike was right!, dear. I did hear that report, but I don't think you did. Either that, or you're not very good at comprehension. In any event, your post disarmingly non-sequitur.

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/07/721172140/boeings-troubles-with-737-max-jets-could-disrupt-its-business-model

24

Thanks for reminding me what pieces of shit teenagers can be, Screaming dear. I can always count on you for that.

And while I strenuously support abortion (I think it should be the first option to consider when a woman finds she's pregnant) I can't, in good conscience, endorse the whole abortion-after-birth thing. The paperwork is just too much.

25

@23- I think that some of the other posters are right, and this piece has more to do with trying to drive Boeing stock down than with chicks with dicks, snotty kids, or retroactive abortion. I used to think that Charles was just beside himself with glee anytime that he could ginn up an argument that capitalism was (really, really, this time for sure) dying, but he seems rather obsessed with Boeing lately.

26

I can't think of an economic prediction Charles has made that has actually come to pass. Anyone have an example?

27

Chas, once upon a time when you weren't paying attention, there were these things called banks that provided liquidity to the economy and a safe place for people to keep their money. Over time and through gluttonous interest rate manipulation the banks swelled to obscene girths, marbled with the fat of government protected lending practices until they were slow and easily mounted by rapacious jockeys of ill repute and led to market for slaughter. But, too enormous to fit through the gates of their own destruction, the banks instead just parked their giant fat asses on the public concourses where they still sit today.
Did you know Boeing is one of only a handful of airplane manufacturers in the world Charles?. Too big to fail, too broken to break.

28

OK, I got up wa-a-ay early today to see if we still had capitalism, and -- surprise, surprise -- we still have capitalism.

29

@26

You know, I thought for sure that Our Bumbling Mudede would have at least called the Vancouver housing market bust, but I went back and checked and I'll be damned, he never did.

It's all race-baiting and fearmongering about Our Future Hot Money Chinese Overlords right up to the very end, and not a whisper of a suggestion that the bubble might pop instead.

30

the company had approximately $25 billion in stock repurchases over the past 3 fiscal years, and almost all of it was funded with free cash flow from operating activity, not debt.

31

Oh, Charles. I used to look forward to Lindy's column. Now, I have yours. Thank you! BTW, any good Gas Station wines I should know about?

32

Ok, I am probably way off here but, Chuck makes me think that peoples from the continent of Africa have a REALLY hard time understanding Capitalism and Democracy. If only we could somehow be more like Africa.

33

I just have to say that Boeing didn’t manufacture the component that was faulty in either of the crashes, they were manufactured by other contacted companies and Boeing just installed the part and assembled the plane.


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