You’ve got that one totally backasswards. Typical GMO plants are modified to be tolerant of broad-spectrum herbicides, LOL. It saves an incredible amount of energy and labor (no more tilling to kill weeds). What a meathead.

Consider me a “court jester” summoned to entertain. Given my role as knave, I can use financial satire to speak frankly stirring debate about things that might cause visceral reactions in one camp or another.

RJ – as for Timber (by way of FD – I am certainly no expert) I simply like inherently. As with everything, there is a price that makes it more or less attractive. I underdstand (from cursory reports) it has been “rich”. But precisely these deals and last prints make the existing portfolios of PCL and RYN look cheap and undervalued by comparison (or the recent deals unsustainably expensive. Swenson has supposedly pared holdings which says something.

Nonetheless, while admittedly not that esoteric, it combines the current yield and hard asset backing with low leverage which while not exempt from correction, has a better risk-reward profile (or less bad) under either extreme inflation or extreme deflation than most other asset classes resemble more binary risk/reward profiles.

It’s a very good post. But it’s a “Cassandra Does Tokyo” post (which I also read and appreciate) rather than a Naked Capitalism post… Do guest bloggers have an obligation to try to imitate the house style, or should they come and do their own thing? Yours in whiny anonymity.

The attraction of timber as an asset is simply that it grows for free. Gold or oil sitting in the ground does not multiply or increase on its own; agricultural crops like corn need constant seeding, fertilizing, irrigation, insecticides and herbicides every year. But you just leave a stand of trees to grow on its own: all they need is rain and sunshine, which nature provides for free.

Timber is thus a commodity with a built-in interest rate. Other commodities can do no better over the long term than match the rate of inflation.

Even better is that the value of a big tree is much more than simply the extra volume of wood, because bigger trees can be used for things (telephone poles, beams, etc) that smaller thin trees can’t. So the rate of increase is better than linear.

This article makes some of these same points.

You mean this isn’t hard-hitting finance analysis?

Damn, I better go replace the Calder I just took. Anyone got a crane I can borrow for a few hours?

Then, post Cassandra’s Choice of the Week on Friday with the explicit instruction that your readers become “listeners”. The reader/listeners should push that “Listen Now” button at the top and listen to the voice over read the chosen song lyric or poem.

I’d get a kick out of that cyber-computer voice over dude channeling Dire Straits “Industrial Disease”….

An excerpt:

The work force is disgusted downs tools and walks
Innocence is injured experience just talks
Everyone seeks damages and everyone agrees
That these are classic symptoms of a monetary squeeze
On itv and bbc they talk about the curse
Philosophy is useless theology is worse
History boils over theres an economics freeze
Sociologists invent words that mean industrial disease

Doctor parkinson declared Im not surprised to see you here
Youve got smokers cough from smoking, brewers droop from drinking beer
I dont know how you came to get the betty davis knees
But worst of all young man youve got industrial disease
He wrote me a prescription he said you are depressed
But Im glad you came to see me to get this off your chest
Come back and see me later – next patient please
Send in another victim of industrial disease

I go down to speakers corner Im thunderstruck
They got free speech, tourists, police in trucks
Two men say theyre jesus one of them must be wrong
Theres a protest singer singing a protest song – he says
they wanna have a war to keep us on our knees
They wanna have a war to keep their factories
They wanna have a war to stop us buying japanese
They wanna have a war to stop industrial disease
Theyre pointing out the enemy to keep you deaf and blind
They wanna sap your energy incarcerate your mind
They give you rule brittania, gassy beer, page three
Two weeks in espana and sunday striptease
Meanwhile the first jesus says Id cure it soon
Abolish monday mornings and friday afternoons
The other ones on a hunger strike hes dying by degrees
How come jesus gets industrial disease