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There is a superb example of the way the government is embracing Web 2.0. I have just seen a tweet from #hmtreasury pointing to the fact that there is now a bunch of photos of 11 Downing Street on flickr.

If you click through to them you will see a series of the kind of Marie Celeste style photos of stately homes that upmarket estate agents have put online when some member of the aristocracy has had their property seized.

You can see the 19th Century prints that line the staircase; the original Low cartoons from World War II making fun of politicians and situations we have long forgotten.

There are no people. Every surface has been polished, but no people.

I can attest to the fact the photos are genuine because I have been inside No11 for the various drinks parties Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have thrown there; and memorably stood on those very stairs as Mr Darling's special adviser tried to explain to us the legal basis for the chancellor's decision to guarantee all savings in Northern Rock; oh and traipsed through the subterranean passageways as the PM and chancellor bailed out the banks.

These rooms have been the scene of some of the most testosterone driven crisis meetings of modern economic history - the sacking of Fred Goodwin and Andy Hornby, the Northern Rock bailout, and who knows what else? Not to mention the all-night curry sessions that have kept the chancellor's two favourite tandoori restaurants in the black during the downturn.

Now what would be really Web 2.0 would be to put a Skyped up camera in these rooms and leave it running. Taking photos of empty rooms and uploading them to flickr and then alerting everybody on Twitter seem a little, well, er - shouldn't they be busy organising a new round of efficiency savings?

Alternatively we could liven things up by using the pictures as the backdrop for silly photomontages depicting the events described above. In a moment of ennui during my 12 hour shift working on tonight's programme, I have given it a go. Captions please?

The historian is concerned with finished facts, a journalist has to be concerned not just with real-time information but with the near future. So all these secrets are getting a bit distracting.

Just over a year ago I, like many others, was obsessed with the question: what is the government about to do about the banking crisis?

The revelation yesterday of what they actually did - unleash a £61.7bn secret loan to HBOS and RBS - is a reminder that even for journalists, what happened in the past may be the most important question.

Because Mervyn King and Alistair Darling's revelations, delivered in the anodyne and obscure language the British state uses when it wants to drop an embarrassed bombshell, raise more questions.

We covered one of them on Newsnight last night. Namely, why did the Lloyds board see fit to withhold knowledge of the secret loan from its shareholders at the point where they were about to recommend merging with the fatally stricken HBOS?

As banking expert Pete Hahn said on Newsnight: Lloyds shareholders could be forgiven for asking whether the board at this point was working for them or working for the government.

Another respected banking academic told me last night that the HBOS intervention had "all the hallmarks of industrial policy in the banking sector". That is, in the guise of a system rescue, for the good of the country, there is also a company rescue with state funds. A kind of British Leyland of banking.

But there is a second tantalising question. How close did we come to a complete collapse of the finance system? The FT reported, unattributed, the comment that both HBOS and RBS had come "within minutes" of closing their ATM networks. That, in case your imagination is waning, would have created queues numbering millions on every high street, bankrupting small firms, bringing our supermarkets to a standstill in the same way protesters froze Britain's filling stations in the fuel protests.

I have always answered the question "What would have happened if the government had not intervened to save the banks?" with the quip: "the riot police would have had to intervene". Now it is not so funny.

But if the two major banks came so close to a liquidity-driven insolvency - in the case of HBOS just 15 days after Lehman's collapse - it throws even harsher light on the failure of the bank bosses, regulators and politicians.

The revelation about the Emergency Loan facilities allows us to know, in a way we did not know, how rapidly the global crisis had engulfed Britain's giant retail banks. It also allows us to understand Mervyn King's increasingly doleful expression as he reads out figures and predictions that should, by rights, indicate the worst is over.

Because it is highly likely, say bank analysts, that the 420 days Mervyn King sat on this information were darker days for RBS, HBOS and Lloyds than anybody knew. That they were in greater danger during the 19 January "second recapitalisation" than we thought.

It also allows us to understand more Gordon Brown's anger - I was close enough to see him shake with it - on the 19 January, when he accused RBS of withholding information during the bailout process.

At that point we only knew RBS had taken the £20bn recapitalisation money; we did not know it had also had £37bn on its own secret credit line.

I know of nobody in mainstream politics who thinks the Bank of England should not have stepped in, but there is a debate now both about the initial secrecy and the decision to maintain the secret.

The need to avoid a mass bank panic and to actually demonstrate some adept control was what made them act swiftly and silently on 1 and 7 October 2008, in advance of the 8 October bailout agreement and the 13 October sackings of the RBS and HBOS management.

It is a pity we haven't got an Andrew Ross Sorkin in Britain (or a business and political elite that would co-operate with such a figure) to tell the inside story of what went on.

The question marks over the short term secrecy concern the Lloyds takeover. I have heard it justified in this way: since the Lloyds takeover had the effect of sacrificing Lloyds to save HBOS and steady the entire system, you could say breaking the principles at the very heart of shareholder capitalism was justified.

The only problem is, as I pointed out last night, Gordon Brown had a lot riding personally on the Lloyds-HBOS merger: he had brokered it and ripped up EU Competition Law to make it happen. He had gone voluntarily on TV the day before the emergency loan to say he was "confident" it would happen despite the 32% slump in HBOS share price.

The uncomfortable fact is that what helped save the system also helped save a specific corporate project Gordon Brown had backed to save the system. Another solution would have been to intervene, nationalise, bailout etc HBOS - which they had to do anyway as the situation collapsed.

The argument in favour of having to sacrifice Lloyds shareholders, in the end, comes down to the spectre of four million customers queuing for their money.

The long-term secrecy is harder to justify. There are now people saying it was an open secret. Not so. There are a lot of open secrets in finance, of much greater importance than this. I will give you an example that I have not been able to give up to now.

Warning - contains formerly secret information: In the week between the HBOS emergency loan and the RBS emergency loan somebody in the world of hedge funds told me RBS had for several days been struggling to stay solvent overnight.

This was the rumour going around the hedgie fraternity. It is irresponsible to report rumours - even to allude to them - in situations like this. Even to start boisterously inquiring about this could have played into the hands of hedge fund short sellers, so I was extra discreet in making efforts to find out if it was true.

They came to nothing and were overtaken by events. By Monday 6th October RBS shares were in freefall anyway and it was doomed. The rumour now looks a lot more credible, because within days they had run out of money: not capital, but liquidity. Their own personal global ATM machine had eaten their card, so to speak.

The point is: even a secret as market-sensitive as this would have got out if it had been "common knowledge". And by January the secret loans to RBS and HBOS were repaid. As it is, most people I know who do trade the shares or analyse the industry are saying they are flabbergasted.

It is very strange to be sitting in a news environment with finance journalists reporting on what secretly happened a year ago to the banks, while defence journalists are digging over what secretly happened in the run up to the Iraq war, and human rights reporters are telling the story of other secrets emerging from an Iraq torture inquiry.

State secrecy, in finance as well as war, seems set to create a whole new branch of retrospective journalism: a kind of Now That's What I Call The Truth! - Volume 69 type industry.

Mind you, with so much changing so rapidly about our knowledge of the crisis, maybe it has to be journalists not historians who grapple with it. Who would want to write the definitive account of last October's crisis with so much still secret?

Right now loads of media execs, from Rupert Murdoch to Alan Rusbridger, are trying to answer three basic questions: a) which readers will pay for online content; b) which content; c) how will they charge them? There is a fourth question which I will ignore for now, which is, how does the print business survive once questions a-c are answered.

Here's my own personal take on this from my own behaviour. For demographic geeks I am a 49-year-old white male who reads mainly nonfiction, has an iPod full of classical music, a Twitter and Facebook account.

I buy the Guardian and the Telegraph every day in hardcopy and the FT on certain days (see below). I buy the Speccie, the Statesman and the Economist every week and Private Eye religiously. I was the first UK TV journalist to report from inside Second Life, though my SL character (Paul Mason) has not strutted his stuff for many a year.

My LinkedIn account is moribund. I watch very little on TV apart from sport, programmes about animals or repairing tanks, and of course The Thick of It.

Here's the content I regularly buy on the internet.

1) Books. I buy nearly all my books from Amazon and Abebooks. When I am writing a book or a major project I tend to actually buy rather than go to the library since the British Library is full of teenagers chatting and reading Heat magazine. I don't buy e-books but watch this space once I get a Kindle. Probable monthly spend right now online on books = £30.

2) Music. It took me a while to stop buying CDs as iTunes is still not comprehensive for classical music and above all you need to have Opera librettoes and I have learned a lot from the little CD booklets that you can never read anywhere else. However I have not bought a CD for at least 12 months (except a Chinese migrant workers folksong CD in Beijing). Incidentally this is the new role of CDs - you buy them on trips to "analogue places" where you know you will never get the music online. Monthly spend on iTunes - probably £10 a month max, mostly from iTunes but also e-Music: but remember I have 3x decades worth of CDs on my iPod.

3) Academic articles. I am a sucker for these. Some I buy for work - the Â鶹ԼÅÄ's access to academic firewalled sites is remarkably scant - and some I buy for my non-work research projects. Am nearly always disappointed by the content since the sneaky info-monopolists will never tell you what is in the article before you buy it. Still, I know more than I need to about the metallurgy of Neodymium magnets. Probably spend about £12 per article, three or four times a year.

4) Newspaper archive articles. Via the Â鶹ԼÅÄ I have comprehensive access to recent press cuttings. But for history writing etc the New York Times and Wall Street Journal etc are precious. I think nothing of shelling out a few dollars on an of former Fort Issy commander Edmund Megy decking a New York journalist at a "communisic banquet" on Bleecker Street in the 1870s. I will gladly go on doing this at the cost of a few dollars a time if I have to.

5) Online newspapers. Zilch. Nada. I think the only things you HAVE to read in newspapers are the following:
a) Brilliant exclusives that have not been picked up anywhere else - and that includes still photography which is still a major plus and not properly bigfooted by any broadcast website
b) Brilliant analysis pieces that your peers have read and will form the basis of watercooler discussions among your peers/contacts
c) Something that is going to give me competitive advantage in my job. Nouriel Roubini's RGE Monitor falls firmly into this category but if I actually had to pay for full access, I could not afford it.

Thus far not a single UK newspaper produces any of these things enough for me to want to pay online for them. I read every op-ed by Paul Krugman and . is free on the NYT; Wolf I buy on a pink piece of paper that flaps a lot and soaks up coffee. I almost immediately bin the Companies and Markets section of the FT but keep the front bit, ripping out Martin's bit and stuffing it in my pocket. Usually, as an added bonus for my £2, there is more than just Martin Wolf: so I feel I have got a bargain. I would probably pay £2 per article for Martin Wolf online - even if Martin occasionally does not fire on all cylinders I have to read him to be able to have a sensible conversation with, say, the global chairman of a major bank, should I run into him. I should think there is an equivalent in any profession, so this is a scaleable model.

6) Uber specialist bulletins. I will usually get away with a free trial on something like RGE Monitor or . But if not I will pay per article rather than subscribe since these info-sources are not regularly essential.

7) The Internet. It should be borne in mind even as I surf the Guardian website or Huffpo "for free", that I am paying about £25 a month for broadband. I would probably pay more for the same service as long as it broke down less and was more secure and faster. It is still a marvel of modern business life that nearly every broadband provider on Earth has tried and failed to charge for content as well.

8) Tickets: Since I have included books I should add that my highest expenditure online for offline "information" is for theatre tickets. Obviously the tickets are a commodity but the plays/operas/musicals are content. This seems to be well in excess of £50 everytime I fork out. And that is too often for my own good.

Now to the answer to the big three questions at the top and what it means for those trying to charge for content.

The great complicating factor, as , is that news has become "social". People want to be able to share it; its distribution models are based on sharing; so put it behind a paywall and the sharing dies. For example if I want to share with you a Youtube video it's easy. Once I want to share Martin Wolf's latest missive, difficult.

In addition, the new emperors of firewall city will not only charge. They are working out ways to prevent us from finding paid-for content on search engines like Google. News International and Microsoft are reported to be working on de-indexing content from Google.

OK my provisional answer is:

a) Who: nobody will pay for news. Only specialist news content providers will make a go of charging for news. News is commoditised. I know none of this is new but I have a new certainty about it, having thought it through. But anybody - and not just middle class high value types - will pay for content that is of high value to them.

b) What: they will pay for music, books and specialist articles; increasingly for video once watching it on a computer makes sense; also for participation in niche online games. They will pay for specialist editorial content but not news.

c) How: The charging will have to incorporate an element of BOTH micropayment AND shareability; as per iTunes vouchers or sending your mate a book via Amazon. I suspect micropayment will win out, and what would be really cool would be able to pre-pay for somebody else's access as in: with a bit.ly style access code that takes you right through the pay wall. Excluding your content from searchablity AND at the same time erecting a paywall sounds a bit like taking yourself out of the phone directory and for good measure having your landline disconnected.

The massive, still not properly understood, conclusion to this is that there is going to be a smaller news economy. Much smaller. News is going to have to be produced for its social value, by organisations that make their money out of selling something else. The big anomaly at present is that those who do sell that something else online - above all Google - do not pay for the news. This will probably have to change.

Anyway, discuss, bearing in mind I am the man who predicted the Internet would kill 24-hour rolling news.

After 130 years the business publisher RBI is closing , once the biggest voice in the UK construction industry. Having worked there as a sub-editor and feature writer in the mid-90s it is a sad day.

The parent company has been on the block itself - job advertising has migrated to the internet, contract notices long ago migrated to the official EU journal, and on top of that the construction sector has been hammered in the recession.

So, goodbye CJ.

When I worked at CJ it was staffed, quite simply, by one of the most knowledgeable, professional and effective teams of journos I have ever seen. They were able to ring and get through to everybody who mattered in their industry - the bosses of the major house builders, the key ministers, the big civil engineering clients, the unions, the plant-barons.

The thrill of working at CJ was that there were two well-funded competitor titles: and who were constantly engaged in a battle to scoop, "shaft" and sabotage us - and the feeling was mutual.

Thus, though the subject matter was only contracts, claim, counter-claim, bankrupt house builders, collapsing tunnels and the construction death toll, the atmosphere on news days (it was a weekly) did at times resemble all those scenes in Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell's film, .

And what copy they wrote. I remember having to sub the following sentence about a backhoe loader produced by a Chinese company: "X has produced a cab in which the controls, layout and ergonomics are perfectly designed, provided you are just five feet tall."

I learned there how to read a company balance sheet and P&L account (ie with disdain). I watched and learned as the investigative team took down rogue builders and stayed one issue ahead of every trend in the management, finance and operational culture of the industry. I learned what a JCB actually does and how to keep out of the way of one.

I joined CJ during the brief but eventful reign as editor of Leon Clifford. Leon was one of those trade mag editors who live for two things: industry supremacy for the title and the thrill of the journalistic chase. Working for him taught me how you constantly have to struggle to shape, reshape and reshape again the page, the mag, the brand of the title.

And the CJ management's attitude to legal threats remains the benchmark against which I've judged all other editors I've worked for - basically it was "Go ahead punk, make my day".

I wrote the first big feature in CJ about e-commerce, in 1995 and worked on an early pitch that would have revolutionised online commerce in the construction industry: CJ proposed to launch a Treasury-sponsored bidding website for the burgeoning PFI industry.

It was squashed by competition: from an internal Treasury project and from RBI's own IT department who took exception to having those pesky files with the suffix ".html" on their precious unix server. This was at a time when journalists had neither web access nor e-mail as standard on their desktops.

At CJ we drank together regularly after work and on non-deadline days, throughout lunchtime. When I joined one veteran writer told me that he could drink 13 pints of Guinness at lunchtime and still turn in decent copy. I think I once saw him prove it too.

We launched regular mini-insurrections against the management on many things, but never once had to deal with pressure on editorial from advertisers. It was an RBI point of honour never to let the ad and editorial sides influence each other. Content was always king.

Sadly, for many of its titles, RBI never worked out how to make the business model it had perfected in print work on the web. It is the jobs websites and Google that have taken much of its revenue. But neither Craigslist nor Google nor the Jobs websites produce editorial content.

Increasingly it is impossible to make money out of news in the specialist trade journalism, so the scrutiny is diminished.

There is a lot of negativity around right now about the quality of local newspaper journalism. has had a justified pop at the dire state of the local papers we are all supposed to treasure and defend in the name of local democracy.

However, with the trade press it was always different: when you are writing for specialists and managers you just cannot cut editorial costs. The need to employ experienced journalists with high standards means you simply cannot reduce a trade magazine to one guy with a Samsung digital camera and a laptop, as some local news "empires" do. So the need to actually produce journalism gave the trade magazine model very little room for financial manouvre,

I'm glad to say that many of my former CJ colleagues ended up running trade journals in the rising sectors of the economy: a whole bunch of them now work for leading mobile telephony websites and magazines. Another became famous for investigating terror-linked Islamists. And as for me, I've ended up knocking out blogs and occasionally appearing on Newsnight.

And although I can assure you Guinness no longer plays a part in the editorial process, I still use almost every other skill I learned at CJ.

The rare earth story goes to the heart of China's relationship with the West - not just that, but to the heart of the West's inability to understand China.

It is a complicated story, involving a whole chunk of the , high secrecy, patent battles and conspiracy theory.

But it boils down to this - 97% of the specialist metals that .

China is already limiting exports and has plans to limit them some more. As a result much of the hi-tech metals industry is also moving to China.

As you can see in my film for Newsnight:

First the science.

There are 17 rare earth metals; they have got their own special bit of the Periodic Table.

In nature they are mainly found clumped together underground in specific types of rock and ore, so they have to be separated.

It takes a large quantity of rock to make a tiny quantity of rare earth. And the rock can often be radioactive. For now just try and remember two elements - Lanthanum and Neodymium.

In the early 1980s a US company called Ovonics perfected a rechargeable battery using rare earth metals that would form the basis of a whole branch of experimentation in electric and hybrid cars.

For geeks, the battery is a Nickel Metal Hydride battery (NiMH) and uses, primarily, Lanthanum.

But remember the name Ovonics. The firm formed a JV with General Motors, ceding 60% ownership to the car giant.

Meanwhile in 1982 General Motors discovered a new compound that could make cheap, highly effective, permanent magnets, again using a rare earth - in this case Neodymium.

Again for geeks - the nomenclature is a Neodimium-Iron-Boron magnet (NdFeB).

The primary effort at turning science into commercial technology here took place in the United States, with GM at the hub.

In parallel, these scientists were putting in place the key technologies for green capitalism:

• battery powered cars would become crucial in the effort to wean us off the petrol engine and;

• permanent magnets are a crucial component in almost any gadget that moves or sees or is guided by a computer.

And both technologies rely on rare earth metals.

Now the geology.

As far as we know there is rare earth ore in California, Canada, South Africa, Brazil, Vietnam and Australia. There's even some in Greenland.

But the mother lode is sitting under the mountains 50km (30 miles) north of the Inner Mongolian city of Baotou, in the Bayan Obo mine.

In addition to Bayan Obo, China has also found massive deposits in Sichuan.

As Deng Xiao Ping presciently commented, at a time when electric cars and wind power seemed like ecotopian wet dreams: "Arabia has oil, China has rare earth".

The story of how China seized a stranglehold on the ore supply and then large parts of the metallurgy is a modern epic.

"Either by stupidity or design" says one industry insider, "the Chinese flooded the market in the mid 1990s and collapsed the price. Almost everybody else went out of business".

For the purposes of today, there are three big potential sources of rare earth outside China - in California, Canada and Australia.

The Californian mine has not produced since 1998, the Australian mine was set to start production in 2011 but has just lost its financing and the Canadian mine likewise is aiming at 2011. Together their annual production could amount to one third of China's.

Each of these projects has been hampered by lack of finance, particularly since the financial collapse of 2008. Some industry voices say the danger of China flooding the market again, making the mines uneconomic, means only a strategic rather than pure economic view makes them viable.

So with the doubling of demand and the collapse of non-Chinese supply, China ended up with 97% of the ore market.

But as the industry for processing the metal and making products out of it developed rapidly in the late 1990s and this decade, China has also managed to bring much of that on-shore as well.

In addition to producing nearly all the rare earth metals, companies operating in .

How has it achieved this? First by relentless state-backed focus.

If you do a web search for the scientific papers on rare earth, a lot of Chinese results come back. China's metallurgy industry flourished while the West's declined.

But increasingly China has started to pare back exports. It places an export tax on rare earth and a quota. In each of the last two years the quota has been shrunk by 20%.

There is of course, this being China, a flourishing black market. In addition to the 35,000 tonnes officially exported, another 20,000 tonnes were somehow consumed outside China.

There is also endemic illegal mining of the stuff in the Chinese deserts. This export limit is an overt signal to producers of rare earth products that, to ensure supply, they need to move production into the People's Republic of China.

Now, in addition to the export restrictions so far, another problem is looming. China's demand is predicted to equal the entire Chinese supply by 2012.

In a recently released - but not published in the West - draft report, Rare Earths Industry Development Plan 2009-2015, the Chinese government and a cap on exports at the current level (35,000 tonnes).

Officials later downplayed this, reminding journalists that since "no-one wants to give up profits" the quotas are rarely enforced. However, if they were enforced - ie if smuggling was stopped - it would be a big problem.

Unless the non-Chinese mines ramp up production, there will be a shortage outside China. So Western companies who want to manufacture have, increasingly, got to move onto the Chinese mainland.

As Dr Ian Higgins of the Birkenhead rare earth firm Less Common Metals told Newsnight:

"What you're going to get is no opportunity for manufacturing outside of China. And it just depends how far you think it's acceptable to take this policy. Somewhere along the line do we say 'yes, the world does need some strategic control in terms of manufacturing these materials'?"

Now to the reasons why this is such a problem for the rest of us.

The wind farm and the hybrid car - the two key technologies in the transition to green energy use - are completely reliant on rare earths.

There is about a tonne of rare earth magnets in a wind turbine and about 2kg of Neodymium in the rechargeable battery of a Toyota Prius, plus another kilogram or so of Lanthanum and Praeseodimium in the drive train up the front.

(For those whose focus is more on blowing people to smithereens, it is also disconcerting that .)

Now to the response of the two big manufacturing powers outside China - the US and Japan. How have they coped with this complex problem of rising new technology creating a resource monopoly for China?

In summary, very differently.

Japan's car manufacturers jumped into the electronic vehicle game early. As a result a joint venture between Toyota and Panasonic is the world's leading manufacturer of rechargeable NiMH batteries.

Likewise on the magnet front, again largely due to the foresight of Toyota and its ilk, Japan makes the majority of the the Neo magnets that are not made in China.

Japanese companies hold an unspecified stockpile of the key materials. In addition Toyota has become the first car maker to own a mine - it has set up a rare earth mine in Vietnam which will solely produce for its car plants.

In addition, according to The Times newspaper, about 20% of all Japanese rare earth imports are black market. One Japanese offical :

"If the Chinese export quota limits were the reality of what comes into Japan each year, we would be even more worried than we already are."

Now what you can say about Japan's attitude to rare earth is that it is canny. The state and major companies are aligned, they're combining geo-politics with realpolitik up to - if The Times is correct - the point of tolerating a black market.

They have, in the process, gained the best part of a decade's head start on the West in cleantech cars. And, though they are reliant on China for rare earth, they have effectively pulled China into an Asia-centric rare earth economy.

Contrast this with the US. It was not just the free market that closed the Mountain Pass mine in California, but environmental concerns about radiation.

But for whatever reason the US allowed its own rare earth source - the second largest in the world - .

Next, the rare earth magnet business. In 1996, GM sold its magnet business, Magnequench, to a Chinese-led consortium. It then moved large parts of its Neo magnet production operations to China.

Magnequench has now been taken over by a joint Chinese-Canadian business, but the bulk of its operations remain in China.

There is a large literature of political and over this.

Next the rare earth battery business.

In the late 1990s GM famously scrapped its work on the EV1 plug in car and crushed all known models out in the desert.

It sold Ovonics, together with the patents for the key battery technologies, to Chevron/Texaco - an oil company - which successfully sued Toyota to maintain intellectual property rights over of the technology.

The resulting company was named Cobasys. During its period of ownership by Chevron it failed to produce NiMH batteries in large numbers. A highly polemical account of this can be found in the Sony Pictures film

In 2004, a protracted legal dispute between Cobasys and Toyota/Panasonic was resolved by the Japanese firms agreeing to pay Cobasys about $30m and also royalties on the batteries sold in America out to 2013.

As a result of the the battery situation in the US is beginning to free up, but the legal battle leaves those promoting hybrids - and their next-generation development, the plug-in hybrid - rueing their dependence on non-US manufactured NiMH batteries.

Sherry Boschert, , wrote in 2007: "It's possible that Cobasys (Chevron) is squelching all access to large NiMH batteries through its control of patent licenses in order to remove a competitor to gasoline.

"Or it's possible that Cobasys simply wants the market for itself and is waiting for a major automaker to start producing plug-in hybrids or electric vehicles."

Cobasys has now been between Samsung and Bosch, which specialises in the rival Li-Ion battery (which is not so rare earth dependent).

What matters, in the long-run, is that the US lost any kind of lead in electric car battery manufacturing and left the Japanese complex of Toyota, Panasonic and Sanyo as the NiMH battery superpower.

It has also taken a major bet on Li-Ion technology which some commentators doubt .

Meanwhile, when Panasonic and Sanyo merged, China's competition regulator this year ordered these two Japanese companies .

There are no prizes for guessing which country's cash rich state-backed companies will be queuing to take this division off their hands.

Stepping back to see the bigger picture: in little more than two decades China has achieved absolute dominance in the raw materials side of rare earth and forced much of the manufacturing industry to move to China.

Its coming export restrictions will force more of this, but will probably also stimulate non-Chinese raw material production as the price rises.

In the process China has acquired key tech transfers, as is its stated aim under the so-called 863 Program.

And, as a byproduct of US corporate decision making, the China-Japan axis has emerged as the centre of the rare earth economy.

The US is now so worried about all this that in the National Defense Act 2010 there is for the first time a whole section requiring the government to launch an urgent probe into the impact of rare earth dependence on national security.

But for years US governments - both in the Clinton and Bush eras - have stated they have no problem with the transfer of rare earth jobs, plants and science to China.

The whole story reveals a mismatch between Western and Asian ways of doing business, and of perceptions.

President Barack Obama has now, reportedly, accepted there will be a global resource crunch within a decade, led by peak oil.

But the Chinese and Japanese governments and industrial elites have been operating on a resource agenda for the past decade. China is demonstrably using foreign policy to gain direct access to supplies of raw materials.

When the Afghan war began, and the Russian involvement in the "Stans", it became common to talk about Central Asia being the "New Great Game" for the warring superpowers.

But the real new Great Game is being played in the swamps of the Niger Delta, on the borders of Colombia-Venezuela, in the metal mines of the DRC and now in the rare earth mines of the world.

For example, China attempted to buy 51% of the Australian rare earth mine, but pulled out in September when the Australian government .

For decades US foreign policy, and much of the Western world behind it, has focused on security of supply of oil from the Middle East.

Chinese policy - foreign, industrial and commercial - now centres on finding and securing supplies not just of oil but of all major natural resources needed by an economy developing at 9% for the rest of the century.

The old, oil-based policy shaped the world; the rise of freemarket capitalism after 1989 became possible because no rival powers existed that could fragment the world economy and challenge US dominance; the new, multi-resource based policy of China (together with Japan and South Korea) is what is reshaping the world.

It has put roads through Kenya, and sent Chinese engineers into the swamps of West Africa and the airless space of the Andean metal mines.

As Asia powers out of the recession it is enchancing the prestige of a model based on resource monopolies, giant integrated manufacturing empires, overt black-marketeering and state directed industrial policy.

The FT's Martin Wolf reminds us we are conflict between the US and China over trade and currency - and these two issues are what dominate the thinking of free-market, Western-trained economists when they think of China.

But it seems to me that the West has been largely blindsided by the growing importance of resource strategy.

While the West was thinking about one thing, the big Asian industrial powers were thinking about another.