Deal of the Decade

Deal of the Decade

Imagine McDonald’s ditching the griddle and adopting flame-broiling for its burgers — even bringing in experts from Burger King to help with the transition.

Paradigm AI authority James Altucher says that’s the best way to think of a rumor that hit the tech space last month.

As the story went, Intel was entertaining a partnership with archrival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. TSMC would send its engineers to Intel’s advanced manufacturing facilities, upgrading them to state-of-the-art for the AI age.

“Intel's stock experienced its biggest weekly gain in over 40 years of trading history,” says James, “surging as much as 32% at one point.”

And then the buzz faded. INTC trades this morning a little over $20 — basically where it sat before the rumors began, indeed where it sat back in… (gulp)... 2013.

End of the story? Hardly.

“Apple just committed to spending a staggering $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years,” says James.

“Let that sink in for a moment — half a trillion dollars.

“Most of the headlines focused on Apple's plans to open a server manufacturing facility in Houston and double its U.S. Advanced Manufacturing Fund.

“But what if there's something bigger brewing beneath the surface?”

And he means really, really big…

“What if Apple is eyeing Intel as an acquisition target?” James asks.

“It sounds crazy at first, but the more you look at it, the more it starts to make sense.

“Over the past decade, Apple has gradually made moves to reduce their dependence on outside suppliers.

“This began with the company’s decision to design their own processors for iPhones, iPads and Macs with the highly successful M-series chips. Just last week, Apple announced the C1, their first in-house cellular modem.

“With $54 billion in cash, Apple certainly has the financial firepower to make a big move. And Intel, despite its troubles, still possesses world-class manufacturing capabilities and a treasure trove of chip patents.

“For Apple, acquiring Intel would mean bringing chip production fully under its control — eliminating reliance on foreign manufacturers like TSM. It would align perfectly with Apple's newly announced commitment to U.S. manufacturing and the billions it's already planning to spend on advanced silicon in TSM's Arizona facility.”

This deal of the decade would also align with the Trump administration’s priorities.

In February, Vice President Vance declared that the most sophisticated AI hardware must be “made in America.”

“When it comes to manufacturing advanced chips in the U.S.,” says James, “no one is further along than Intel. Last month Intel announced that their 18A manufacturing process is ready and they will begin the initial stages of preparing customer orders in the coming months.

“18A is expected to help Intel close the gap with TSM and has already received orders from Big Tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon.”

And all this at a time when Apple CEO Tim Cook says he’s “bullish on the future of American innovation."

“What could be more innovative,” asks James, “than backing America's most advanced chip production?”

An Apple partnership with Intel, or even an outright acquisition, “could represent a generational wealth opportunity.”

[Reminder: James and his entire research team have converged on Austin, Texas this week for the annual SXSW gathering.

Tomorrow James and crew will livestream their two-hour Tech Turning Point 2025 event — and it couldn’t possibly be more timely. Money is shifting out of the Magnificent 7 stocks and into a new breed of up-and-coming tech leaders. Crypto is facing challenges despite tailwinds from the Trump administration. And speaking of the Trump administration, what do Trump and Elon Musk have up their sleeve?

James and his team will address all of those questions tomorrow at 2:00 p.m. EDT. We won’t try to sell you anything during this event. It’s strictly for your enlightenment and enjoyment. You can review the agenda at this link. That link is also where you can find the live event tomorrow, so go ahead and bookmark it.]

NOW They’re Talking About a Recession?

Whether it’s the president refusing to rule out a recession (the mainstream explanation) or an ongoing reset for a market that rose too far, too fast… Mr. Market is mashing the “sell” button today.

At last check, the S&P 500 is down 2% to 5,649 — a level last seen nearly six months ago. The index sits 8% below its record close not even three weeks ago. The Dow is holding up better, the Nasdaq worse.

Gold is serving its safe-haven role, continuing to hold onto the $2,900 level. But silver’s losing ground, now $32.22. Crude is down modestly at $66.69.

Bitcoin went up, down and all around over the weekend — and as we write it’s in danger of breaking below $80,000 for the first time in four months.

To be sure, the president and his men are tamping down expectations for the economy.

As you might have heard, Donald Trump himself refused to rule out the possibility of a recession yesterday, describing a “period of transition.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent summoned a better turn of phrase last Friday — describing a “detox period.”

As he put it on CNBC, “Could we be seeing that this economy that we inherited starting to roll a bit? Sure. And look, there’s going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending.”

None of this should be a shock if you’ve been following these missives regularly.

Paradigm macroeconomics maven Jim Rickards has been warning of a recession for months. From the standpoint of the Trump administration, the sooner it arrives the better.

“In Ronald Reagan’s first term, he inherited a recession from the Carter years,” Jim said in this space a couple of weeks after Election Day.

“This dominated the first few years of his presidency until his policies turned the economy into a robust growth machine.

“We see the incoming Trump presidency seeing a similar timeline. Expect some tough economic times in the first 12–18 months before a pivot to a strong economy in the second half of the Trump term.”

The stock market back then, you wonder? It struggled mightily for the first 18 months of Reagan’s administration — before launching an epic 18-year bull run in August 1982.

Trump Wavers on Time Change

Hey, whatever happened to this?

If your rear end is dragging today, blame it on time change.

“There's evidence that regularly changing sleep cycles, associated with daylight saving, lowers productivity and increases heart attacks,” economist Allison Schrager wrote in The Atlantic over a decade ago.

For years we’ve debunked the claims that daylight saving time conserves energy. Up until 2006, most of Indiana’s 92 counties observed year-round standard time — in sync with New York during the winter and Chicago during the summer. Then the Hoosier state’s legislature opted for conformity.

In 2010, researchers from Yale and the University of California, Santa Barbara concluded the energy saved by less indoor lighting during the summer months was offset by an increase in the use of heating and air conditioning. Indeed, daylight saving time contributed to a 1% jump in electricity use.

Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal spotlighted more recent research finding that “in some places daylight-saving time saves electricity, while in others it uses more, with the overall effect across the U.S. basically a wash.”

Evidently time change is still on the Trump administration’s radar. Last week, Elon Musk posted an enormously confusing poll on his X platform.

The Gallup pollsters did a much more straightforward and presumably more scientific survey finding a majority of Americans wishing to ditch time change — and a plurality preferring year-round standard time.

Perhaps someone should bring those poll results to Donald Trump’s attention. Asked about the matter last Thursday he appeared to have lost interest — saying, “It’s a 50-50 issue, and if something’s a 50-50 issue it’s hard to get excited about it.

“A lot of people like it one way, a lot of people like it the other way,” he went on to say.

Gee, it almost sounds as if he’s running cover for special interests. Read on…

The Truth About Time Change

We endure the madness of DST because of special interests — going all the way back to the Uniform Time Act of 1966.

Contrary to myth, that wasn’t done for the benefit of farmers. Indeed farmers “now had an hour less of morning light to milk their cows and get goods ready for market,” wrote Michael Downing in his 2005 book Spring Forward: The Madness of Daylight Saving Time.

Rather, the mid-1960s change was the doing of Big Oil — which benefited from higher gasoline consumption during the longer evenings.

But the history doesn’t end there. As Cato Institute senior fellow Scott Lincicome wrote in 2021, “The gas and fuel industries were then joined by the golf, home improvement and barbecue/patio industries to lobby for the 1986 expansion of DST from six to seven months, because each industry gained hundreds of millions in additional sales revenue each year.”

Finally in 2005, seven months of DST became the current eight — “driven,” wrote Lincicome, “by the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) and U.S. candymakers, each of which wanted Halloween to occur during DST because it boosted candy and, again, gasoline sales.”

And while special interests prosper, Americans as a whole suffer.

“The semiannual time change results in all sorts of maladies in the days thereafter,” Lincicome wrote: “car crashes and pedestrian deaths; workplace injuries; heart attacks and strokes; depression; and ‘adverse medical events’ because of ‘human error.’ (Mental note: Don’t get hurt/sick on time-change weekends.)”

In the final analysis, Lincicome concluded DST is “an onerous state time mandate detrimental to public health and safety, manipulated by corporatists, supported by a handful of childless insomniac socialites and based on so-called ‘science’ debunked decades ago.”

Mailbag: China-Taiwan, Our Free Event

“Do you believe that in the near future President Trump will do a deal with Xi Jinping (bypassing the Taiwanese) to avoid war with the PLA over Taiwan?” a reader inquires after last Thursday’s edition.

“This would certainly save a lot of $$$ and U.S. lives and heck there are only around 24 million Taiwanese, who are indistinguishable from the Han Chinese on the mainland.

“Would love your opinion. Keep up your scribbling.”

Dave responds: It’s conceivable — although I’d hope that any “grand bargain” between Trump and Xi doesn’t explicitly consign the Taiwanese to CCP rule.

At the same time — and as I expounded at length two years ago — there’s nothing about Taiwanese democracy that’s worth risking war with a nuclear-armed mainland China. It’s swell that Taiwan has enjoyed multiparty elections since 1996, but there’s nothing about the freedom and prosperity of everyday Americans that hinges on it.

Unfortunately that’s not the consensus inside the Beltway. Nor is it the consensus inside the Trump administration, loaded with China hawks itching for a confrontation.

Last, a skeptical take on James Altucher’s Tech Turning Point 2025 event tomorrow.

“Response to your ‘free seminar’ with ‘no gimmicks’: Sorry but my experience says that you guys, like you say everyone else is, are all about making more and more money. I don’t usually listen because I’m tired of the ‘fear of loss’ sales pitch at the end.”

Dave: Really?

I mean, look, admittedly we do plenty of hard sell around here. That’s the trade-off to our business model in which we’re funded by the subscription revenue of readers like you — rather than by advertisers or payoffs from public companies.

We recognize that over time it can become a little tiresome — so that’s why we aim to mix things up with events like this one. (Jim Rickards and his crew will be doing something similar toward the end of April.)

Tomorrow will be strictly two hours of you listening to James Altucher and a bunch of other smart people holding forth on AI, crypto, quantum computing and biotech. And it definitely won’t be the same-old, same-old you get from CNBC.

Once more, here’s the agenda for when everything gets underway tomorrow at 2:00 p.m. EDT. Hope you can be there!

Best regards,

Dave Gonigam
Managing editor, Paradigm Pressroom's 5 Bullets