Latest news with #AngelaDavis
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Forests Might Be The Hottest Asset Class You're Not Watching. They Pay A Return, Hedge Inflation And Provide Planet-Friendly Optics
Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below. Timberland properties are becoming a go-to investment for the wealthy, and regular investors are starting to catch on. An Overlooked But Powerful Portfolio Play Timberland is giving investors a chance to earn steady returns, hedge against inflation and diversify their portfolios with a sustainable asset. 'Forest investors are typically not looking for high risk and high return,' Campbell Global President Angela Davis told Forbes. They're looking for yield, inflation protection, 'environmental virtue' and something that doesn't move with the stock market. The company, which was acquired by J.P. Morgan Asset Management in 2021, manages $10 billion in timberland. Don't Miss: The same firms that backed Uber, Venmo and eBay are investing in this pre-IPO company disrupting a $1.8T market — Accredited Investors: Grab Pre-IPO Shares of the AI Company Powering Hasbro, Sephora & MGM— Davis oversees 1.4 million acres of timberland across the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. According to her, a properly managed forest can deliver around a 4.4% annual yield from harvested wood alone. Add long-term log price growth and carbon credit sales, and total returns can hit 7%. 'Let it grow. Sell a higher volume at a higher price later,' Davis told Forbes about her long-term approach to timber prices. Unlike public real estate investment trusts tied to mills, she can afford to be patient. Even with all the natural obstacles like wildfires, pests, protected areas, and hungry bears, Davis says sustainable forestry still works. Her team of 75 foresters actively manages risk, cuts compromised trees, and builds firebreaks. Trending: 'Scrolling To UBI' — Deloitte's #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones. Timber REITs Bring The Forest To Your Brokerage Account Public investors don't have to buy land to get in. Shares of timberland REITs, like PotlatchDeltic Corp. (NASDAQ:PCH), Rayonier Inc. (NYSE:RYN) and Weyerhaeuser Co. (NYSE:WY) offer exposure without the hassle. These REITs pay dividends, and all are traded on major exchanges. PotlatchDeltic had a 4.18% dividend yield, Rayonier offered a 4.56% yield, and Weyerhaeuser had returned 3.26% year to date. Timber REITs are attractive for sustainability-minded investors because timber is a renewable resource, and many REITs follow sustainable forestry timberland comes with risks. Prices can swing with housing markets, and wildfires or new regulations can damage profits. For those interested in exchange-traded funds, there are just two timber-focused options: the Guggenheim MSCI Timber ETF (NASDAQ:CUT) and the iShares S&P Global Timber & Forestry Index ETF (NASDAQ:WOOD). But with only three timber REITs in the market, these ETFs include other lumber-related businesses like paper production. Read Next: $100k+ in investable assets? – no cost, no obligation. This article Forests Might Be The Hottest Asset Class You're Not Watching. They Pay A Return, Hedge Inflation And Provide Planet-Friendly Optics originally appeared on
The National
4 days ago
- Politics
- The National
Leading academics call on Labour to overturn Palestine Action ban
The letter, signed by figures including Angela Davis and Naomi Klein, hailed the 'growing campaign of collective defiance' against the group's proscription under terror laws and commended the hundreds of people who plan to risk arrest on Saturday at a protest in support of the organisation. Expressing support for the group, banned in an unprecedented move by the Home Secretary earlier this year, can result in a prison sentence of up to 14 years. Signatories to the letter, published in The Guardian, include Ilan Pappe, Judith Butler, the writer Tariq Ali, novelist China Mieville. Two representatives of Scottish universities are also included: Rahul Rao, of St Andrews and Emilios Christodoulidis of Glasgow. READ MORE: John Swinney to consider imposing state boycott on Israel The letter said: 'As scholars dedicated to questions of justice and ethics we believe that Yvette Cooper's recent proscription of Palestine Action represents an attack both on the entire pro-Palestine movement and on fundamental freedoms of expression, association, assembly and protest.' It added: 'As hundreds of people again risk arrest by joining street protests on August 9 and as students and teachers prepare for the start of another turbulent academic year, we express our full solidarity with those mobilising on their campuses or in their workplaces and communities to put an immediate stop to the escalating genocide and to end all UK complicity with Israel's crimes.' More than 500 people have pledged to protest in support of Palestine Action outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster this weekend. The Metropolitan Police said it was prepared to make mass arrests. Palestine Action was banned after activists caused an estimated £7 million worth of damage to planes at the RAF Brize Norton military base. READ MORE: Yvette Cooper under pressure to grant UK visas for 80 Palestinian students Co-founder Huda Ammori is attempting to overturn the ban through the courts and this week accused Home Secretary Yvette Cooper of making 'false allegations' against the group. It comes after 300 Jewish public figures, including director Mike Leigh and author Michael Rosen, wrote to the Prime Minister protesting the ban. The letter, by the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Bindman KC and the playwright Gillian Slovo, accused the Government of 'hand-wringing over the level of slaughter and suffering in Gaza and the West Bank' and of offering 'tacit support' for Israel's actions.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Leading global scholars sign letter urging UK to end Palestine Action ban
Naomi Klein and Angela Davis are among dozens of international scholars and writers who have signed a letter to the Guardian calling on the UK government to reverse the ban on Palestine Action. The letter applauds what it describes as a 'growing campaign of collective defiance' against the ban and commends the 'courageous stand' of hundreds of people who plan to risk arrest by declaring their support for Palestine Action during a mass protest in London on Saturday. Signatories from major academic institutions around the world also say they are 'especially concerned' about the ban's possible impact on universities across Britain and beyond. It comes as the pressure group Defend Our Juries plans to hold a 'mass action' in London on Saturday where participants have been asked to hold up signs saying: 'I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.' Police have warned they will carry out mass arrests of anyone contravening terrorism laws. A separate Palestine solidarity march is taking place in London on the same day. The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, proscribed Palestine Action last month after activists caused an estimated £7m of damage to jets at RAF Brize Norton military base in Oxfordshire. On Wednesday, a cabinet minister urged members of the public to stay away from events supporting proscribed organisations. Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, said the government would not dictate to police how they handled any action and added that some coverage had also been 'conflating legitimate protests'. She commended pro-Palestinian protesters who she said had been peacefully demonstrating outside parliament. But she added: 'There's a difference between that and supporting a proscribed terror organisation that wishes harm on the British people. And I would just urge people to stay away from those sorts of events and to exercise their democratic rights in a peaceful and legitimate way.' The letter from Klein, Davis and others states: 'As scholars dedicated to questions of justice and ethics we believe that Yvette Cooper's recent proscription of Palestine Action represents an attack both on the entire pro-Palestine movement and on fundamental freedoms of expression, association, assembly and protest.' It adds: 'As hundreds of people again risk arrest by joining street protests on 9 August and as so many students and teachers prepare for the start of another turbulent academic year, we express our full solidarity with those mobilising on their campuses or in their workplaces and communities to prevent genocide and to end all UK complicity with Israel's crimes.' Along with Klein, the Canadian author and activist who is now a professor at the University of British Columbia, and Davis, a former member of the Black Panther party who is now a distinguished professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, other signatories include the American feminist philosopher Judith Butler, who is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Others who have signed the letter include the philosophers Étienne Balibar and Rebecca Comay. Historians include the Israeli political scientist Ilan Pappé of the University of Exeter and the British-Israeli academic Avi Shlaim of the University of Oxford. Prominent Palestinian signatories include Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, Abdaljawad Omar, an assistant professor of philosophy and cultural studies at Birzeit University, and Haidar Eid, an associate professor of postcolonial literature at al-Aqsa University in Gaza. They are joined by the political thinker Michael Hardt of Duke University and Eyal Weizman, the British-Israeli founding director of Forensic Architecture and a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. Their letter comes after 300 left-leaning Jewish figures, including the director Mike Leigh and the author Michael Rosen, earlier this week wrote to the prime minister, Keir Starmer, to describe the ban on Palestine Action as 'illegitimate and unethical'. That letter, by the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Bindman KC and the playwright Gillian Slovo, also accused the government of 'hand-wringing over the level of slaughter and suffering in Gaza and the West Bank' and of offering 'tacit support' for the actions of the Israeli state.
Forbes
01-08-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Want To Hedge Against Inflation? Buy A Forest
I nvest capital and save the planet at the same time. Own a forest. That's the selling proposition from Angela Davis, who, as president of Campbell Global in Portland, Oregon, oversees $10 billion on behalf of institutions and wealthy individuals. So far she has acquired 1.4 million acres of trees, the majority in the U.S., with some in Australia and New Zealand. Do not expect from timberland the kind of action you'd get from a semiconductor stock. 'Forest investors are typically not looking for high risk and high return,' Davis says. What are they looking for? Four other things: a yield, an inflation hedge, a portfolio-stabilizing lack of correlation to the stock market and the environmental virtue that comes from taking carbon out of the air. Pedro Oliveira for Forbes The yield comes naturally. Trees grow. Douglas fir, the money tree in the Pacific Northwest, is harvested at 45 years of age. A timberland property that contains tracts evenly distributed over the age spectrum will have an average age of 22. This means the wood that can be taken annually from mature trees comes to 4.4% of the total volume of wood in the forest. That 4.4% botanic payout is the starting point for expected return. Log prices, sensitive to homebuilding demands, are extremely volatile, but over the long pull they, and the residual value of cleared land, should keep up with inflation. Add in inflation and a 7% nominal return is within reach. Beyond that, Davis aims to beat the averages by astute management of the land. Her trees absorbed a net two megatons of carbon dioxide last year, generating salable carbon credits. She has 75 foresters on her staff. They keep an eye on bugs and arrange for culling of compromised trees before the damage can spread. When blazes threaten, they bring in bulldozer crews for fire breaks. An acre of Doug fir, left to grow and harvested in year 45, might yield 24,000 board feet of saw timber, worth $17,000 when it arrives at the sawmill. Sounds pretty good, given that forests in Oregon and Washington west of the Cascade Mountains can be had for $4,000 to $7,000 an acre. But there is a long road between the standing tree and the sawmill's check. Landowners in the Northwest lose at least half their revenue to the cost of growing and harvesting wood. Trees must be felled with dangerous and expensive equipment, dragged up muddy and steep slopes with cables, cut into lengths, loaded onto trucks and hauled. Slash (limbs and broken pieces) must be burned or chopped. Reforestation, done right, delivers better yield than would come from natural regeneration, but it's expensive. 'You overplant, then thin, like carrots in a garden,' Davis says. In the years between seedlings and harvest, a portion of the acres will have been lost to fires, floods, insects and disease. A fraction of the acreage—16% in a recent Campbell acquisition on the Olympic peninsula—cannot be cut because it's near a trout stream or an owl's nest. Bears must be bought off; they come out of hibernation so ravenous that they rip the bark off trees unless they are given food baskets. A timber management company like Campbell (acquired in 2021 by JPMorgan Chase) has to be paid. Campbell doesn't disclose fees beyond saying it gets, in hedge fund fashion, a percentage of assets plus a performance bonus. What's left for the investors? The ones who signed up for Campbell's recent $2.3 billion funding round deserve to call themselves contrarian. Although timberland has terrific years, such as between 1991 and the financial crisis, it has done poorly of late. Campbell doesn't release results for any of its partnerships, but you can look at publicly traded real estate investment trusts that own timberland. In the past decade they have delivered a pathetic 4% a year on average, vastly underperforming the stock market. How To Play It By William Baldwin Buy timberland via shares in real estate investment trusts, handy in taxable accounts because their dividends come out as long-term capital gains. The enterprise value (common market capitalization plus debt minus cash) of Rayonier Corporation is $4.4 billion, which comes to $1,800 per acre if you assign no value to its mills. At PotlatchDeltic the corresponding number is $1,900. At both, you get a bit of Douglas fir in the Northwest, but the dominant holding is southern yellow pine, whose price is depressed because of overplanting 30 years ago. Presumably the industry will grow out of that problem. Yields are 4.9% at Rayonier and 4.7% at Potlatch. William Baldwin is Forbes' Investment Strategies columnist. Davis protests that the REITs don't have her flexibility with timing. They all are attached to mills, which they are motivated to keep running. So they cut trees even in years when prices are depressed. Her response to a dip in the log market: 'Let it grow. Sell a higher volume at a higher price later.' Davis was born in Portland 60 years ago, at a time when lumber was the region's economic mainstay. Business is more diversified now, but, she says, 'it's hard to grow up in Portland and not have a connection to the land.' She remembers gleaning hazelnuts as a youngster on a family orchard. Her connection to forestry, though, began not with the outdoors but with spreadsheets. After getting a degree in finance at nearby Linfield University, Davis worked as an auditor and then as an investment analyst for the Oregon state treasurer. She joined Campbell at the turn of the century and will become its chief executive in October. Her job is to use geographic information, climate and tree volume data to predict what will come out of a harvest decades later. A big part of this, as with a vineyard, is assessing terroir—what growth rate can the soil and the rain support? The spreadsheets go out two growth cycles. Ninety years is a long waiting time for even the most patient investors, but they don't have to stick around. A large part of the return comes not from harvesting but from selling acres after the trees have put on some weight. Campbell's last fund has a 12-year exit option. Beginning in the 1980s, environmentalists engineered drastic cutbacks in harvesting from federal timberland. President Trump wants to bring back the chainsaws. Despite the potential competition with her assets, Davis is not opposed. Untended forests are more likely to burn, she says, undoing decades of carbon absorption in a flash. 'For forest health you should be doing some harvesting,' Davis says. 'Take out the dead and dying debris. Put in some roads.' She may have a woodman's ax to grind, but she has a point. If those roads reduce fire risk, they might even find favor with the owls and the bears. More from Forbes Forbes The Best Brokers For Saving On Capital Gains Taxes By William Baldwin Forbes Is Your Broker Gouging You? Use This Guide To The Best Buys In Money Markets By William Baldwin Forbes How To Use Gold And Other Hard Assets To Hedge Against Inflation By William Baldwin Forbes How To Boost Your Cash Yield At Fidelity, Vanguard, Chase And Schwab By William Baldwin Forbes The Best Places To Retire Abroad In 2025 By William P. Barrett
The Guardian
23-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘I was one of the few people able to document it': shooting the Black Panthers
'They understood the media and culture,' says Stephen Shames of the Black Panthers, who he photographed in the 1960s and 70s. 'Black leather jackets and berets like the French Resistance – they commanded attention and projected strength and hope with their 'hip' clothes and discipline.' This image shows Angela Davis speaking in Defermery park at a Free Huey rally. This photo is Angela Davis's portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC. Black Panthers and Revolution is at Amar Gallery, London, until 6 July Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale speaks at the first national United Front Against Fascism conference. About 4,000 delegates, most of them white, came from all over the nation. Seale announced that control of police would be the Front's first project. The Black Panther Party was one of the most influential responses to racism and inequality in American history. The Panthers advocated armed self-defence to counter police brutality, and initiated a programme of patrolling the police with guns and law books On 28 October 1967, Oakland police officer John Frey was shot to death in an altercation with Huey P Newton during a traffic stop. In the stop, Newton and backup officer Herbert Heanes also suffered gunshot wounds. Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter at trial, but the conviction was later overturned Black Panthers founder Huey P Newton claimed that he had been falsely accused, leading to the 'Free Huey' campaign, which then developed alliances with numerous individuals, students and anti-war activists, 'advancing an anti-imperialist political ideology that linked the oppression of antiwar protesters to the oppression of blacks and Vietnamese'. This incident gained the party even wider recognition by the radical American left. Newton was released after three years, when his conviction was reversed on appeal Bobby Seale was taken off the street as he left his wedding ceremony on 19 August 1969. He was charged with starting the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention. Shames writes: 'James Baldwin came to visit Bobby when he was in the San Francisco county jail before being sent to Chicago for the Chicago Eight trial, where Bobby was bound and gagged by Judge Hoffman. I was honoured to be able to witness these two giants in conversation. They became lifelong friends, meeting together often' Black Panther founders Bobby Seale and Huey P Newton stand in front of their national headquarters. Seale believed that 'no kid should be running around hungry in school', a simple credo that lead FBI director J Edgar Hoover to call the breakfast programme, 'the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralise the BPP and destroy what it stands for' White supporters hold Free Huey signs at a rally in front of the Alameda county courthouse where Black Panther minister of defence, Huey P Newton, was on trial for killing an Oakland policeman Davis smokes a cigarette as she relaxes in the backyard of a supporter's house during her trial. 'This is a private moment,' says Shames. 'The Panthers introduced me to Angela and she allowed me to be present during private moments like this with her family and support team. Photographs like this are what make this exhibit at the Amar Gallery so special - the behind the scenes moments that I was one of the few people to be able to document' A child at the Intercommunal Youth Institute, and the Oakland Community School. In 1970, in Oakland, David Hilliard created the idea for the first full-time liberation day school. This school, and its attendant dormitories in Oakland and Berkeley, was simply called the Children's House. This school concept, directed by Majeda Smith and a team of BPP members became the way in which sons and daughters of BPP members were educated Black Panthers carry George Jackson's coffin into St Augustine's church. In 1961, Jackson was convicted of armed robbery (as a teenager stealing $70 at gunpoint) and sentenced to one year to life in prison. During his first years at San Quentin state prison, Jackson became involved in revolutionary activity, as well as assaults on guards and fellow inmates. This behaviour was used to justify his continued incarceration on an indeterminate sentence. Jackson was killed on 21 August 1971 while in the maximum security prison Martin Luther King Jr speaks at the University of California at Berkeley. The speech about the Vietnam war drew thousands of students George Murray, minister of education for the Black Panther Party, speaks at a Free Huey rally in Defermery Park, which the Panthers re-named Bobby Hutton Park, in honour of their slain 17-year-old comrade. Murray was a leader of the San Francisco State student strike, which was put down by governor Ronald Reagan. Far left is Kathleen Cleaver, communications secretary and the first female member of the party's decision-making Central Committee
