Good morning. Boeing hired Robert “Kelly” Ortberg as its next chief executive, picking an aerospace veteran to steer the jet maker through its manufacturing turbulence and a regulatory storm.

• Who is he? Ortberg, who previously ran one of Boeing’s big suppliers, Rockwell Collins, takes over an American manufacturing giant that is grappling with quality issues, production slowdowns, high-stakes labor negotiations and a plunging share price.
   
• What Boeing faces: In a particularly striking reputational blow, Boeing in early July said it had agreed to plead guilty to misleading air-safety regulators in the run-up to two deadly 737 MAX crashes, a move that would brand the world’s biggest aerospace company a felon.

Corporate felon: Not what it used to be

• Previous agreements: The requirement by prosecutors to plead guilty comes after the Justice Department said Boeing had failed to live up to a more lenient agreement it struck in 2021 related to the crashes. Under the terms of a proposed plea agreement, Boeing would be required to hire an outside consultant to monitor its compliance with safety regulations and pay an additional $243 million in fines.
   
• Impact of plea: Pleading guilty could create fresh business challenges for Boeing, since companies with felony convictions can automatically be suspended or debarred from public contracts. But there’s evidence to suggest that the impact could be more limited—especially given all Boeing’s other problems.
   
• Mitigating factors: When a possible suspension is in the cards, regulators often waive the potential aftershock. Boeing is expected to seek such a reprieve from the Defense Department, where it landed contracts last year valued at $22.8 billion, according to federal data. A Defense spokesman said last week that officials haven’t decided on a waiver yet for Boeing.

Brian Nelson leaving Treasury to advise Harris presidential campaign.

Brian Nelson is leaving his job as the U.S. Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the end of this week, according to a Treasury spokeswoman.

Nelson, who has worked at Treasury since late 2021, will join the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris as a policy adviser, according to a campaign official.

At Treasury, Nelson led the development and implementation of U.S. counterterrorist financing and sanctions policy, which includes cracking down on terrorists and money launderers.

• Delta Air Lines Chief Executive Ed Bastian said the carrier took a $500 million hit from the CrowdStrike technology outage that hurt its operations.

Kamala Harris’s record offers only hints of a China worldview.

As vice president, Kamala Harris stood on a Philippine ship in the South China Sea and denounced Beijing’s attempts to assert control there as “unlawful and irresponsible.” From Japan, she reaffirmed American support for Taiwan’s self-defense, angering Chinese officials.

But in her single, brief meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Harris delivered a friendlier message, urging open communication between the two rivals.

Over almost eight years as a senator and vice president, Harris has offered only fleeting glimpses of how she would put her mark on America’s tense relationship with China as president. 

• Fed Chair Jerome Powell said officials could cut interest rates at their meeting in September, moving closer to a new phase that seeks to avoid weakness in the labor market in the midst of signs inflation is heading lower.
   
• U.S. crude oil inventories fell more than expected last week for a fifth consecutive decline amid a rise in exports, and gasoline stocks fell as demand remained buoyant, according to data released Wednesday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
   
• Food companies are working on fixes for consumers fed up with high prices, while trying to protect some of the biggest profits earned in years.
   
• Efforts to address the cause of climate change have fallen short so far. That is leading to a big push to treat the symptoms.
   
• A fresh batch of China property data suggests that the sector remains in bad shape, heaping pressure on policymakers to take bolder action to address what has become a major drag on the economy.
   
• The Asian manufacturing recovery seems to have continued at the start of the second half of 2024, with survey data signaling fairly healthy factory activity in July despite the threat of inflation and a pullback in demand. But China’s factory activity took a downturn, with the headline PMI slipping into contraction territory for the first time in nine months.
   
• A throng of Chinese merchants who supply Temu stormed a company affiliate’s office Monday in Guangzhou, southern China, to protest what they consider unfair penalties that left some bankrupt.
   
• Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is protected by a sprawling security service despite anger at home and international pressure over Sunday’s contested presidential election.
   
• Canada’s economy continues to show resilience after rebounding at the start of the year, though the pace of growth slowed through the second quarter and is unlikely to throw up hurdles for the central bank to continue cutting rates.

• Former President Donald Trump attacked Vice President Kamala Harris over her race, baselessly suggesting his election rival only began identifying as a Black woman in recent years.
   
• Sen. Mark Kelly’s experience running successfully to the center in a border state, and his willingness to buck his party on immigration issues, has helped him stand out among possible vice presidential picks, say allies of Vice President Kamala Harris.
   
• A bipartisan tax bill that sailed through the House six months ago is nearing a dead end as the Senate is poised Thursday to kill the once-promising deal and turn it into fodder for campaign-trail finger-pointing.
   
• Meta on Wednesday said quarterly digital advertising grew rapidly while the company’s investments in artificial intelligence and the so-called metaverse weighed on profits.

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