Much appreciated, and I accept. I’m a journalist and not allowed to own stock for professional reasons, so that stuff is important for me. I hope things get better for you.
Well, could you elaborate on what you meant with your references “Plus the dollar’s weak as piss” and “Since the bid was in dollars, do you really have to ask that?”, because I don’t understand how the bid being priced in dollars, which is currently very low against the Euro is somehow an advantage for us “Eurotrash”.
Not allowed to own stock? Even if you were a financial reporter, surely you’d be allowed to invest?!
I think the idea is that he needs to be able to pursue any story wherever it goes, and since he can’t ever be sure that he won’t uncover a story involving Company X, he can’t own stock, or else the decision to publish/bury that story would appear tainted. Even regular investment in an index fund isn’t safe, because it’s understood that several major companies can drive the price of that fund on a given day – to the point where publishing a damaging story on the last day of the month vs. delaying it until the second day of the next month could have a tangible financial benefit to him.
I imagine there’s a mechanism by which he could invest in a “blind trust” of some sort, but the appearance of conflict-of-interest is a huge bogeyman for anyone who must appear objective.
Look to Lou Dobbs as your example. He can sway the market with his reporting and offer financial advice by telling people which stocks will take a dive! 
I wouldn’t call Dobbs a reporter, he’s a commentator. Actually I’d call him an unholy cross between Howard Beale and a mutant Florida orange. But either way he’s not the only one.
I took a quick review of our code of conduct earlier - and this is academic anyway because I don’t have money to put in the market [hello, I’m a journalist! ;)] - but strictly speaking, at my company, we are not allowed to own stock in parts of the market we cover. Since I am kind of a generalist, I think it is reasonable to conclude that I’m not allowed to invest, with the exception of whatever might be included in a 401k.
Very nice! <APPLAUSE> 
I don’t know how it works for journalists, but when I worked for an asset management firm (as an IT guy) we had to clear any proposed stockmarket transaction with our compliance team. The exception would be transactions where we were not personally responsible for stock selection - those we didn’t need to report.
The logic was to avoid conflicts of interest where we might use our professional buying capacity to increase the value of our own assets.
Northrop’s press releases have been all about job creation, and numbers and where (mainly not France).
There’s some speculation among the usual non-insiders that USAF may have felt they had to go against Boeing just to prove they’re clean now, that Darleen Druyun was an aberration and not a symptom.
If USAF actively *discouraged * Boeing from proposing a plane of the size they later decided they wanted, that’s pretty good grounds to think the process was rigged.
For anyone who thinks they’re whiners, remember that Boeing hasn’t filed a protest in 30 years, despite losing quite a few bids in that time.
Fair disclosure: A Boeing win means jobs in *my * company. An Airbus win means jobs for my *former * company, and they’re a bunch of pricks.
Because…? Bad management? Lousy benefits? EADS is populated with cheese eating surrender monkeys?
If you’re Boeing, and you can afford to pitch two proposals (767 and 777) why wouldn’t you do so? If the tanker win is such a big deal, it seems reasonable to go after it with everything you’ve got. If you can propose both the highest-performance and highest-performance-per-cost programs, where will Airbus beat you? They’ll outperform your ‘cheap’ solution, but they’ll also be more expensive. By bounding the trade space Boeing could have owned this project.
Remember that these proposals cost a large amount of money to make, and even then you are not guaranteed the win. Each criteria is given a weight and it is possible to have neither the best performance nor the best performance-per-cost proposal and still win.
If I may turn away from my characteristic immoderacy in this thread and append what flight just said, from a pitcher of these kinds of proposals multiples make a firm look considerably weaker. It’s RFP 101: in the words of our former partner Spectrolab “you don’t want to look like you’re just stabbing around for the right price.”
No, a major supplier, not a prime.
jurph, the inside story can be expected to come out before long. But, generally, an RFP is based on service requirements well enough that a decision that basic need not be made by a bidder. The other answers above are right too.
Again, that’s only Boeing’s side of it.
FTR, they’ve done some record-searching, and it appears this is the first time Boeing has *ever * protested.
Also FTR, McCain is getting a lot of blame for this in both Washington and Kansas, primarily resulting from his whistleblowing on the earlier single-source deal (just because it was corruptly arrived at doesn’t make it the wrong decision). further, some of his campaign staffers were until very recently lobbyists for the Airbus team. Let’s call it that, shall we? EADS is mainly Airbus, and the Northrop Grumman role is mainly to put a “Made in America” label on an existing Airbus product.
Serious question: when is the last time they lost a contract that they were a bidder on? And what percentage of contracts that they bid on do they lose?
I think the Joint Strike Fighter was the last big contract they lost. I seem to remember NOVA doing a story about the competition between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It was interesting to see the difference in corporate cultures.
Lockheed came across more cocky and risk-taking, whereas Boeing was more reserved and conservative. Technically, I thought the Lockheed design was more innovative, but the “look” seemed rather conventional. The Boeing aircraft looked more like a whale scooping up krill.
CynicalGabe, when was the last time Boeing won a contract with the Air Force?
The Joint Strike Fighter program was a competition between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The Lockheed Martin design was chosen on October 26, 2001 and became the F-35.
A competition to replace the C-130 in the 1970’s resulted in prototypes from McDonnell-Douglas and Boeing. The program was cancelled, but McDonnell-Douglas modified their design and was awarded the contract to build the C-17. (Boeing purchased McDonnell-Douglas in the 90’s, and you’ll now see this plane referred to as the Boeing C-17.)
For another tanker program in the mid-70’s, the KC-10 (derived from McDonnell-Douglas’ DC-10) was selected over Boeing’s offering based on the 747. (In this case, the ability to carry a greater passenger or cargo load did not tip the scales in their favor.)
Boeing entered a design in the competition to build the C-5 Galaxy. They lost to Lockheed in 1965. (It’s likely that some of the work they carried out under the design contract benefited the 747.)
I can’t find a cite, but I believe they were a competitor in the TFX program which became the General Dynamics F-111 in the late 60’s.
Boeing’s not exactly hurting for work. They’ve done modifications and upgrades on existing fighters, rockets for the Air Force and NASA, and are hugely involved in the International Space Station, but they haven’t been the prime contractor on a major Air Force program in decades.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I bought five shares of Boeing stock in the early 1980’s and still own it.)
Are you including the companies they’ve purchased, programs other than military aircraft prime-contractor level? And only the biggest ones? Then yes, I think it was the JSF, for which the Lockheed entry was clearly technically superior as well as better-looking.
Anybody who wants to dig into that, be my guest.
That deserves to be addressed. Mainly a matter, not of *bad * management (they’re ruthlessly efficient), but of *arrogant * management. Their longtime CEO, now retired but still very public, created a culture in which the workforce is seen as commodity expenses, not the company’s prime assets. All the managers who came up the ladder during his tenure had to embrace that attitude, at least functionally if not internally, and they usually tended to be selected based on their personal arrogance rather than their leadership ability.
In that culture, management is seen as a generic skill - a good manager can manage anything. That means those few who have been anointed as High Potential, and who have in turn “married the company”, get moved around every few years. But to move up, they have to show improved results over the last person who wasn’t there long enough to do anything fundamental for which he’d get credit. That means beating on the people a little harder, cutting back expenses with another round of layoffs, moving more work overseas, the entire litany of shortsightedness for which corporate America has been known in recent decades. But they’ve done it to the greatest, most pathological extent of any.