New Delhi, May 11 -- An American chipmaker forging a deal to make microchips for a US gadget-maker shouldn't make anybody sit up. But since this involves Intel and Apple, it should-for what it says about US capitalism.

While the pact is preliminary, reports of it gave Intel's stock a far bigger boost than Apple's on Friday. A broker's role is said to have been played by the federal government, which owns a tenth of Intel's equity.

Taken last August for $8.9 billion, this stake was portrayed as a natural outcome of a subsidy granted to the chipmaker under a 'small yard, high fence' policy aimed at autarky in fields like semiconductors. Even so, it marked a closer embrace of what was once snubbed as statism and is now called industrial po...