There are private-sector buyers interested in the more profitable or least loss-making parts of Tata Steel's UK estate, but not the searing heart of Port Talbot's heavier end.
Murphy said analysis of tax collection trends shows that almost half are likely to be dormant or loss-making.
Then in 2015 came the ratcheting up of the UK's carbon tax, which overnight made profitable plants loss-making and led to the three plants shutting last year, including Scotland's last coal power station, Longannet.
Coal-power plants are now heavily loss-making, and the reason is low wholesale prices... [and] what's really hit coal is the increase in the carbon tax, the move from £8 to £18 under the carbon floor price floor last year, which really hurt them and flipped the economics over from barely profitable to loss-making".
It means that many of the biggest games have just lost an important lever in their business models, one which will likely drive up their CPIs and in some cases turn them from profitable to loss-making enterprises.
SK Group channelled 1.8 trillion won at below-market rates from profitable subsidiaries into loss-making firms, including SK Securities Hyundaii subsidiaries pumped 210 billion won into the unprofitable Aluminium of Korea.
Anyone anticipating easy answers is probably asking the wrong questions because the future of journalism is likely to be many things at once: simultaneously vacuous, cerebral, profitable, loss-making, prurient, in the public interest, bite-sized, long-form, knee-jerk, revelatory, depressing, uplifting, funny, grubby, mobile, surprising and contradictory.
Browder said documents were changed to make it appear that profitable Hermitage units were loss-making, allowing the new directors to ask for a $230m tax rebate – which was handed over in a record two days.
IAG does not produce interim results separately for British Airways and Iberia but we would expect BA to be significantly profitable and Iberia and BMI significantly loss-making.
That makes them a dicey proposition in a fast-moving energy market like Britain's, where changes in spot power prices can transform a profitable plant into a loss-making one overnight.
The brothers merged their profitable acquisitions into the loss-making REIT, using it as a shield against taxes.
