FAA/TARIFFS/TAXES/TRADE DEALS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump will visit a Boeing plant in St. Louis on Wednesday [3-14-18] to celebrate the tax cut his party handed to American companies. But lurking in the background is a clash over trade — one in which Boeing is the most vulnerable target.
The tariffs on steel and aluminum that Mr. Trump announced last week have already turned iconic American businesses — Harley-Davidson, Levi’s, makers of Kentucky bourbon — into prey for trading partners bent on retaliation.
Boeing, which sends 80 percent of its commercial planes abroad, calls itself the nation’s biggest manufacturing exporter. So it is the company with the most at stake in a trade fight — especially in China, one of the fastest-growing aircraft markets.
Singled out by the Trump administration as the nation’s primary trade adversary, China has the greatest incentive to respond to the tariffs, economists and other analysts say…
Boeing has prospered since Mr. Trump’s election. Its shares have soared, and last year it posted record earnings and cash flow. Much of that money was made abroad, though, and a counterattack aimed at Boeing could reverberate into the farthest reaches of the nation’s industrial economy.”
-Natalie Kitroeff, “Trump’s Tariffs Make Boeing a Potential Target in a Trade War,” The New York Times online, Mar. 14, 2018