Another possibility: don't do any industrial bailouts and let high-risk investors take their medicine. Next time, risky businesses will find it more expensive to get capital, as investors realize some things they weren't thinking about before.
The problem is how long it takes for that to occur. If the bankruptcies occur immediately, then people learn. If the bankruptcies occur 30 years down the line when a rare event occurs, then the high-risk investors are the only ones left in the market.
If investors can comprehend the 30-year T-bill, then they can price in a bankruptcy expected 30 years in the future. If we can sit here and figure out on our own that a business that will fold if its revenue decreases by 10% for longer than a month is not worth as much as its P/E ratio would naively suggest, then surely other people can figure it out too.
There are reasons why US prefers to bail Boeing. US is always concerned about espionage and dependencies on other countries with respect to national interest. An example would be the whole Huawei+5G debacle.
What if Boeing goes bankrupt and the only reliable plane makers are PRC companies (usually state-backed, even if it's not explicit)?
Boeing needs to be broken up. Parts critical to national security can be federalized. The rest can be restructured to restore competition to the market and eliminate the 'single point of failure'.
Boeing's efforts to consolidate the entire US aerospace industry into one company have hurt our society.
> Boeing needs to be broken up. Parts critical to national security can be federalized.
Where that division line might be isn't clear to me. For instance the 737 is both a civilian airliner and a military maritime patrol aircraft (as the P-8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_P-8_Poseidon)
If Boeing goes bankrupt all of the assets are still there and all of the employees still remember how to do their jobs. A company collapsing is a pure-paper action that means "fire everyone in charge." In some cases, depending on how the corporate governance is set up and on who holds the equity, it's the only way they can be fired.
If the US wants to help out US manufactures for strategic regions, it can apply the usual "made in USA" government purchasing rules, or maybe a tariff.
The problem is, while all this paper shuffling is taking place, state-backed players like Huawei can dominate a market in the interim. Not a good outcome to say the least. I agree that some structural change is needed, but it doesn't have a trivial solution.
