The Russians and Chinese are not playing the Eton Wallgame by the rules.

Hague…bald eagle or blind bat?

Rare Earth – sometimes called New Minerals – is a group of 17 related elements often used in electronic  technology. Though China controls just 36 percent of the world’s rare earth reserves, it supplies 97 percent of global demand. The expertise involved in extraction is almost entirely China-based. So it’s not that China could leave the West behind in hitech: it could leave it bereft.

This isn’t as silly as it sounds. Look at the amount of new oil discoveries over the last twenty years. There haven’t been many, because dumb oilcos chose to give exploration funds to greedy shareholders and directors. A West rapidly going bankrupt will, in turn, be unable to invest in speeding up Rare Earth exploitation.

China is playing off a fascinating and largely hidden deck; but you’d have to be blind not to see where the strategy is going.

Over in Russia meanwhile, former indistrialist and Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky had just been found ‘guilty’ at his show trial for embezzlement. This second shot at the guy showed how potty the Moscow clique can be, in that they offered the ridiculous idea of  Khodorkovsky and his main associate Platon Lebedev nicking all of Yukos’ oil production for six years. The wo9rld is awash with accountancy evidence to prove that they didn’t, but the guilty verdict came in anyway.
To achieve this result, Putin has used all the tricks allowed under the sinister legal system he inherited from the USSR. Lest we forget, Vladimir Putin was a senior KGB agent before his radical career change some years ago. (Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinnejhad made the same switch.)

The trial’s surreal 1930s atmosphere included a prosecutor who didn’t get the difference between the production cost of oil and its market price, and a judge who suggested Yuko’s publication of accounts in English was proof of a desire to mislead the Russian tax authorities.

Putin is clearly a testosterone-fabricated cardboard cut-out of a nutter whose word is as good as a contemporary euro bond. Unfortunately, until the oil age is behind us, this nasty little ferret has his Rambo hands on enough oil top starve the West….and feed China.