Comment by xracy
12 hours ago
Gosh, would be real cool if they hadn't bought all those shares, and just had the cash on hand to help... I don't know... invest in engineering and making planes fly with doors on them.
12 hours ago
Gosh, would be real cool if they hadn't bought all those shares, and just had the cash on hand to help... I don't know... invest in engineering and making planes fly with doors on them.
"Don't be snarky."
"A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(p.s. not defending boeing - just hn thread quality)
That would require thinking more than 1 quarter ahead, and their leadership clearly doesn’t have that many context tokens.
I honestly think their leadership could be replaced with an LLM at this point.
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Speaking abstractly,Why would that be any better?
Why keep the cash on hand when you can raise cash.
I get that people have an emotional reaction to Boeing, but it's not like owning 10 billion dollars of Treasury bonds would have prevented a door plug blowout
> it's not like owning 10 billion dollars of Treasury bonds would have prevented a door plug blowout
I doubt today's announcement is any kind of endorsement by the company about its past foolishness.
I think the assumption here is that, in the past, more money should have been dedicated to ensuring high airplane reliability instead of company profits. And if that had been done, the door plug blowout wouldn't have happened.
P.S.: I'll call it how I see it: it wasn't merely foolishness, it was evil. They prioritized their own profits over the public safety with which they were entrusted.
I find it interesting how people tend to reduce everything to money, as if it is a solution to everything. Not all problems are financial problems that can be fixed with more funds. It matters how you spend those funds.
One of the big problems with Boeing is that they had two parallel quality systems with imperfect and overlapping reporting. I'm sure they could have spent twice as much and had four overlapping quality systems, but I'm not confident that would improve reliability opposed to reduce it.
If the solution to everything was money, companies like wework, quibi, or theranos would just need more investment.
Not everything is a money problem
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It's not an emotional reaction to Boeing, it's a logical reaction to the fact that stock buybacks are a blatant form of market manipulation that were illegal for most of the 20th century. Nobody should be doing them, it's nothing to do with Boeing specifically. Buybacks are almost always bad for employees, customers, and if you're a big enough corporation, the world.
Negative reaction to stock BuyBacks are also emotional and irrational. I've never heard anyone articulate a cogent argument why they are worse than paying a dividend.
You're not supposed to use the $10B to buy treasury bonds.. you're supposed to use it on R&D, manufacturing, QC, etc...
The parents said cash on hand.
You are proposing a third hypothetical. Would Boeing being a better position today if they had spent 10 billion dollars yesterday? Maybe, maybe not.
Who decided that's what they were supposed to do with it?
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You misunderstood the article, Boeing is issuing new shares in order to bolster their cash on hand inventory. They’re issuing shares that didn’t exist before to raise new capital.
Boeing did $43B of stock buybacks in the 2010s. In practical terms those shares did exist before.
I don't know whether they retired the stock they bought back or put them back into the treasury, but in practice it's basically the same thing. Shares are fungible.
Misunderstood the finances, more likely. The difference between selling existing shares and creating new shares is complicated.