Is Boeing on the Verge of Collapse?

In 1997, Boeing was the toast of Wall Street. The company had just overcome regulatory hurdles to merge with McDonnell Douglas, making it the largest jet airline manufacturer and the second-largest defence contractor in the world, a behemoth with over 200,000 employees and sprawling factories and plants dotted around the US. Boeing, as one financial journalist beamed at the time, is "also one of the nation’s biggest exporters, which makes it sort of like the State Department of American industry".