Call it an evasive maneuver.

As 33,000 industrial workers at its Puget Sound industrial hub embark on a shocking strike and its debt load teeters on junk territory, the beleaguered Boeing is considering an emergency move: selling $10 billion in new stock to score some quick cash, sources told Bloomberg on Tuesday. As per usual for Boeing, it may be the smallest headache the plane-maker faces all week.

Short Runway

Just when you think Boeing’s hit a new low, there’s a newer, lower low. Last week, the Federal Aviation Administration released a damning special report following a six-week audit that confirmed everybody’s worst fears: Boeing workers received little training, were pressured to prioritize production speed over quality and safety, and were ill-equipped to build and inspect the planes. Trigger warning for all you borderline aerophobes out there: In one hair-raising example, a Boeing mechanic was found to be relying on an improvised tool to measure the gaps between certain plane parts. Boeing’s not getting any points from us for innovative hacks.

Still, it gets worse — much worse. On Friday, the National Transportation Safety Board issued an urgent safety recommendation, flagging a potentially faulty rudder control component on some Boeing 737 models; on Tuesday, the chair of NTSB sent a letter to the FAA saying the agency’s oversight and response to identified safety lapses were dangerously lax. Oh, and did we mention that a 737-8 Max plane flown by Ryanair skirted disaster when four rear landing gear tires blew out upon landing at Milan Bergamo Airport in Italy on Tuesday? Thankfully, no one was hurt.

Meanwhile, the ongoing strike in the Pacific Northwest is exacting a heavy financial toll:

• According to estimates by JPMorgan Chase, the strike will likely cost Boeing $1.5 billion for every month employees stay on the picket line. On Friday, the union refused to accept what the company called its “best and final offer,” stretching the strike to its third week. A key sticking point has been the reinstatement of a defined pension plan, which was replaced by 401(k)s in 2014.
• The work stoppage only adds to the company’s ongoing cash crunch, and risks sending its $58 billion debt load into junk territory. Fitch Ratings has warned that the strike could have a “meaningful operational and financial impact, increasing the risk of a downgrade.”

Stockbuster: Still, Boeing executives are waiting for a more precise picture of the strike’s impact before initiating any stock sale, sources told Bloomberg — and they may decide against the move entirely. Any stock sale could hurt the company’s share price, already down around 38% year-to-date. However, there may be no alternative if Boeing wants to maintain its investment grade rating, and ​​Vertical Research Partners analyst Rob Stallard told Bloomberg the equity raise could reach as high as $15 billion, a nice financial cruising altitude for now. 

Does this sound like the life you subscribe to?

In a single day, a hypothetical person could wake up, brew some coffee delivered by MistoBox, read The Wall Street Journal, work out at their local GoodLife Fitness while listening to a Spotify playlist, use a transit app to catch the train to work, eat lunch and dinner prepared with produce from a Farmer Jones Farm box, clear their head with The Mindfulness App, and then relax in the evening with a movie on Netflix and a glass of natural cinsault delivered by MYSA Natural Wine before heading to bed with the help of the SleepWatch Premium app.

Each of these actions shares a common denominator: a paid subscription. Mastercard, naturally, sees this (semi-)fictional day plan as a business opportunity. The card payments giant announced Tuesday that it’s acquiring Minna Technologies, a startup that specializes in letting bank and card customers manage (and cancel) subscription services.

It’s an App, App, App, App World

Subscription payments will bring firms a combined $600 billion in revenue from 6.8 billion subscriptions this year, and that will rise to $1 trillion in revenue and 9.3 billion subscriptions by 2028, according to Juniper Research. Most of that money comes from happy customers, but surely you’ve — at least once — smacked yourself on the head when you were dinged with a $49.99 charge after forgetting to cancel a 30-day free trial.

A foothold in helping consumers manage this sometimes cumbersome aspect of life planning is in line with Mastercard’s recent strategic moves:

• Along with rival Visa, Mastercard is trying to diversify beyond card and payment services. Mastercard recently expanded its growing cybersecurity repertoire, while Visa expanded deeper into fraud prevention.
• Sweden-based Minna — which develops tech that lets a user view and manage their paid subscriptions within their existing bank app or website, regardless of payment method — gives Mastercard a foothold in an obvious, adjacent, and expanding market.

Fine Print: How much did Mastercard fork over for this new tech? It didn’t disclose, making the info harder to find than the terms and conditions buried in the deepest, darkest corners of some subscription app menus.

Snack-makers must be working up an appetite with all this deal-making.

PepsiCo announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to buy Siete Foods for $1.2 billion. This marks another acquisition in a year where packaged food M&A has picked up considerable momentum; it also shows PepsiCo might be looking to diversify its stable of products with healthier options.

Chipping Away

Austin-based Siete Foods is a Mexican-American company best known for its tortilla chips and products that cater to a wide host of dietary restrictions. Its founder, Veronica Garza, developed the idea after she had to adopt a low-inflammation diet due to an auto-immune disease. It’s the first acquisition PepsiCo has led in five years, and it brings a more health-conscious brand to its chip portfolio, which includes Lay’s and Doritos — both more likely to induce a food coma than soothe your microbiome.

PepsiCo isn’t the only packaged food-maker looking for ways to scale up its operations. This year has seen a return to form in nibbles-based M&A:

• In August, Mars inked a jumbo-sized acquisition of Pringles-maker and Kellogg’s spinoff Kellanova for $35.9 billion. 
• In March, Campbell’s Soup completed its acquisition of Sovos Brands, the company behind Rao’s pasta sauces.

Weight-Loss Jitters: Snack-makers like PepsiCo have cited weight-loss drugs like Ozempic as a threat to their business models — the idea being that the more widely-used those drugs become, the less hungry the average consumer will be. Eli Lilly may have added to those anxieties on Tuesday by announcing it’s going to broaden its testing beyond obesity patients, using subjects who are not medically overweight. However, not everyone is worried about semaglutide drugs spelling the end of snacking: This summer, Truist Securities upgraded its guidance on Krispy Kreme to “buy” from “hold,” reasoning that the threat posed by weight-loss drugs had already been priced into the company’s valuation. Donuts never die.