Will Boeing drag the economy down in 2020? What about that trade dispute with China?

Barely a month into the new year and already we’re having to crumple up our prognostications about the economy for 2020.

No great loss, though. Predictions are not guarantees or certainties, but they don’t even count as that when every sentence ends with a question mark.

That, admittedly, was what the first attempt at a forecast for 2020 amounted to. Between Boeing, trade spats and deals, slowing economies in the rest of the world, energy prices, and, yes, heaven help us, presidential-election politics, “your guess is as good as mine” was as reasonable an outlook as it was useless and unhelpful.

So let’s take another run at the latest round of business news and see if we can reach any conclusions about how this Northwest economy is going to turn out.

Quick spoiler alert: Don’t get your hopes up.

We’ll start with the obvious, which was Boeing’s massive bad-news dump of a quarterly earnings report, containing such financial delights as revenue in the commercial airplanes segment being less than half of what it was a year ago thanks to the 737 Max fiasco and a $2.6 billion charge against earnings for added expenses from the same source to account for such costs as concessions to airlines not getting the planes they ordered.

Boeing’s new chief executive had earlier announced that the Max won’t get domestic regulatory clearance to fly until mid-year, but the company might resume production at the Renton plant ahead of that. In the meantime, the company expects to be able to keep its Renton workforce employed until it can resume building and delivering planes.

Those assertions and assurances are packed with a lot of qualifiers and conditions, starting with Boeing’s poor track record in predicting when the Max might fly again. What if regulators don’t clear the plane to fly? How long can Boeing keep paying workers to not build planes? Once the 737 Max line starts up again, at what rate? What will happen to orders in the meantime? Those pesky question marks again.

Speaking of in the meantime, the 737 Max debacle (how many synonyms for that word will we need?) is already having an impact on supply-chain employment, not here but in Wichita, Kansas, where fuselage-maker Spirit Aerosystems said it will lay off 2,800 workers and might have to cut further depending on the duration of the production suspension and the backlog of undelivered planes. Aluminum producer Arconic, a Boeing supplier, said it may have to cut jobs, too.

How badly Boeing’s local suppliers are hit depends on the length of the production suspension, how much they have to ratchet back their own production, what other business they can fall back on to carry them through, what financial resources they can rely on (even Boeing doesn’t have endless reserves, so the pinch is going to hit harder and sooner for smaller suppliers) and what they risk in permanently losing employees should they have to lay some off. Any more delays — and that’s not a remote possibility — are going to have serious implications for the regional economy.

Just to add a dollop of gloom, Boeing also said it plans to cut the 787 production rate from the current 14 a month to 12 airplanes later this year. That already had been disclosed, but now Boeing says it will make a further cut, to 10 per month in early 2021, with the hope of returning to 12 airplanes per month in 2023. While that plane is built in both Everett and South Carolina, and it’s not a complete shutdown, the direct and supply-chain impacts will matter.

Got anything else to hang our hopes on? How about the recently concluded United States-Canada-Mexico Agreement and the Phase 1 United States-China agreement? A lot of hope, including for the aerospace sector has been draped on those agreements, on the premise that settling disputes and unwinding tariffs, will spur sales of stuff like airplanes.

Brush away the surface rhetoric and rummage through the particulars of those agreements, and you find some hints of suggestions of possibilities, like the Chinese saying they’ll buy more American manufactured goods, but not much in the way of specific, concrete amounts or settlements. Consider polysilicon, a material made at a big chemical refinery in Moses Lake that has been idled because of a dispute with China over solar-energy panels and the raw materials that go into them. Polysilicon is one of those manufactured goods on the list of stuff China says it will buy, but there’s no specific dollar amount for that material and no lifting of the tariffs on American exports of it to China.

Meanwhile the Legislature grinds away at measures that, if enacted, will have an economic impact — capital-gains or income taxes or low-carbon-fuel standards, for example. Also meanwhile, truck manufacturer Paccar is calling for a slower year of sales for heavy-duty trucks, which signals conditions not only for that sector but for the broader economy, truck-hauled freight volumes being a prime indicator. And also meanwhile …

That’s a lot of ifs, whens, maybes, mights, could-bes and what-abouts to precariously hang an economic prediction on, and notice that tech, a prime driver of the regional economy, hasn’t even entered the conversation yet. We might still get out of this year in decent shape, or we’ll sort of muddle through, or it might all fall apart right quick. We think. Don’t hold us to that.