Advocates for the bailout of Boeing (BA) are citing the “black swan” event of COVID-19 as the reason the company has reached the tipping point of failure. These same people are saying that, in spite of Boeing:
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distributing defective merchandise
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that resulted in loss of life
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then lied about knowingly distributing a defective product
The company is too big to fail because the cascade of job losses throughout the entire U.S. economy would be catastrophic.
We’d argue that demise of Boeing began near the February 20, 2018 period. We don’t know why it occurred at that time, However, the stock had run out of upside momentum and vacillated between the $356.66 price since that time.
The most recent decline is the culmination of the collective wisdom of the markets which decided after March 4, 2019 that the fate of the company had been determined.
As with the bank and auto bailouts of 2008, the belief is that there doesn’t exist the capacity of the largest and most broadly developed economy in the world to absorb the loss of such a big company. Thanks to the bailout to come, we will continue to never know.