Intel

On this day:
9
Arminius’ alliance of six Germanic tribes ambushes and annihilates three Roman legions of Publius Quinctilius Varus in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
1543
Mary Stuart, at nine months old, is crowned “Queen of Scots” in the central Scottish town of Stirling
1855
Crimean War: The Siege of Sevastopol comes to an end when Russian forces abandon the city.
1942
World War II: A Japanese floatplane drops incendiary bombs on Oregon.
1945
Second Sino-Japanese War: Japan formally surrenders to China.
1956
Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.
1971
The four-day Attica Prison riot begins, which eventually results in 39 dead, most killed by state troopers retaking the prison.
2001
Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, is assassinated in Afghanistan by two al Qaeda assassins who claimed to be Arab journalists wanting an interview.

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Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.--Sowell

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Vermont’s socialist U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders only likes markets when they’re broken. Therefore his support for President Donald Trump’s foray into the semiconductor industry is the clearest sign yet that the federal government owning a piece of chip maker Intel is bad news for U.S. technology.

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US Navy SEALs reportedly tried to sneak into North Korea and plant a listening device amid 2019 high-level nuclear talks with then-president Donald Trump. The mission failed after the US operatives, thinking they’d been discovered, opened fire on a vessel that apparently turned out to be a boat of unarmed fishermen, all two or three of whom died.(nyt)

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Intel

Steven Rattner, the Wall Street financier who led the 2009 emergency rescue, said the Obama administration had little choice but to save GM and Chrysler from collapse. “It would have been an economic calamity. You would have had a couple million people out of work. We just felt it was an unacceptable risk to take,” said Rattner.

He spoke on March 9 at Stanford GSB about his five-month stint leading the Obama administration’s task force on restructuring the auto industry.

The rescue team put GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy, overhauling operations and finances with money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which Congress had approved to rescue the financial sector.

TARP. When Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed, its U.S. operations had 1.2 million derivatives transactions outstanding with 6,500 trading partners. Many of them were far from Wall Street, including schools such as Beaver Country Day School outside of Boston or companies like Metavante Corp. in Milwaukee, which had relied on Lehman to help reduce their exposure to fluctuating interest rates through derivatives. In all, the contracts, which were tied to interest rates, bonds, currencies, commodities, and stocks, had a "notional," or theoretical, value of $39 trillion. (wsj)

The notional value of the world's derivatives actually was estimated at more than $600 trillion. Yes, $600 trillion. Notional value is the total value of a leveraged position's assets. This distinction is necessary because when you're talking about leveraged assets like options and derivatives, a little bit of money can control a disproportionately large position that may be as much as 5, 10, 30, or, in extreme cases, 100 times greater than investments that could be funded only in cash instruments. This was done by people who thought they knew what they were doing.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) estimated the net notional value of uncollateralized derivatives risks was between $2 trillion and $8 trillion, a staggering amount of money.

Freedom and risk. Trillions invested by idiots. The world teetering on insolvency.

GM, Chrysler, TARP. And conservatives are worried about a cashless purchase of a little bit of little Intel?

Who are we kidding?

Trump may be philosophy-free, but so are we.