That's what I get for thinking.

I heard the rumor a couple months ago, that Boeing was going to buy the troubled Global Aeronautica factory in Charleston, S.C. Global is a joint venture formed by two long-time Boeing suppliers - Dallas-based Vought Aircraft Industries and Italia's Alenia Aeronautica. The Carolina factory was intended to be the place where about 40 percent of the new 787 was going to be pre-assembled, before being shipped to Everett to be snapped together by a handful of Boeing workers. Snohomish County leaders lobbied hard to get the plant built across the street from Boeing, but Vought and Alenia took advantage of about $150 million in Carolina taxpayer dollars, which offset about 30 percent of the cost of building two new factories there.

As we all know, it turned out to be the most-problematic part of Boeing's 787 global assembly line. Many - but certainly not all - of the early problems that have caused delays in the program come out of Carolina.

So I wasn't surprised to hear that Boeing executives were interested in buying Global Aeronautica. What made me scoff at the rumor, however, was that I was convinced that the owners wouldn't sell.

Vought is owned by the Carlyle Group, one of the world's largest private-equity funds. You might know them from Michael Moore's Farenheit 9-11; Wall Street knows them as a very well connected and historically effective investment group. (Full disclosure: I had dinner with Carlyle managing director David Rubenstein last year while in graduate school, and I have a hard time buying Moore's depiction.)

Carlyle, like other private equity firms, has an MO - they buy undervalued companies in strategic, growth industries, take them private, massively restructure them, run them at a profit for five or 10 years, then cash out by taking them public again. Rubentstein says they can do this because Carlyle pays top dollar for the world's best management talent, and because once they take a company private, they can make the kinds of bold (and expensive) strategic investments that shareholders would never accept in a public company.

Knowing that, I figured that while Boeing might want to buy Global Aeronautica, to get more control over its most problematic 787 partner, Carlyle was incredibly unlikely to sell it. It just didn't fit - Carlyle wants to take Vought public at some point, and having such a vital share of 787 production will be an incredibly valuable asset when the time comes - far too valuable for Carlyle to part with now.

So I dismissed the rumor and went on about my merry business - and got blindsided Friday when Boeing announced it was buying out Vought's share of Global Aeronautica.

So what happened? Heck if I know. We had a really nice dinner last spring in New York, Rubenstein and I and some of my Columbia University classmates, but we didn't become BFFs.

But I certainly can speculate. (That's what the blogosphere's all about, right?) And it's not very hard to draw a line between the recent collapse of Carlyle's mortgage fund and its decision to sell this part of its aerospace portfolio. It's a short-term victory on the sell side: Carlyle managers get cash they desperately need, and Vought gets rid of a headache and an embarrassment.

Yet at the same time, Carlyle loses a helluva lot of upside - more than 800 of those 787s are scheduled to go through that South Carolina factory, and Vought was going to get a nice chunk of the margin on each one. That's gone. So is Carlyle's chance to position Vought as a top-tier supplier in the new world of global aerospace assembly. Both of those factors are going to lower the value of Vought when Carlyle eventually does take it public again.

This whole Carolina venture proves the evil genius of former Boeing CEO Harry Stonecipher. Legendary Boeing boss Bill Allen bet the company to build the 747 in Everett back in the '60s. In the '90s - by outsourcing big chunks of its production - Stonecipher bet someone else's company on the 787. That someone else was Vought.

It also provides us with a textbook example of the difference between operational risk and financial risk. By deciding to build the Global factory in South Carolina, Vought took advantage of cash incentives that greatly reduced its financial risk. It improved on that by outsourcing key engineering and supply chain management functions. But both decisions greatly increased Vought's operational risks, and in the end, the ad hoc, built-from-scratch team Vought put together in Charleston couldn't deliver.

Finance is sexy. It's Gordon Gecho and stretch limousines, $40 cocktails and apartments on Central Park West, trophy wives and million-dollar bonuses. Operations? That's just turning wrenches, and any old schlub can do it. Right?