The plans became widespread in the 1990s when many pension plans were showing surplus assets.
He has derided them as "financial alchemy" because they seem to create surplus assets out of thin air.
New room for readers ReprintsYet the great breakthrough of the register is that, for the first time, departments are being given an incentive to dispose of surplus assets.
Despite the new incentives, suspicious departments will not be easily persuaded to sell their surplus assets, however spurious may be the case for keeping them in state hands.
Reports have said the Bristol-based company could spend up to $7bn£4bnbn) to buy surplus assets from the merger that could include Reynolds Kooll and Salem.
The life insurance business is supposed to be dull — sell policies; collect premiums; salt the money away in the safest sorts of investments, mostly bonds; pay out benefits; and make money along the way by investing surplus assets prudently.
That is primarily because, unlike most dotcoms, it runs on a healthy mix of old and new economy.As an auction house for surplus assets, DoveBid makes much of its money in one of the few lively markets in today's sluggish economy: selling off the remains of defunct companies, most recently those of Enron.
The company, based in Northville, Mich., said that the jobs would be eliminated in the United States, Europe and Brazil, and that it would take a pretax charge of $8 million in the quarter that ended on Oct. 31 for costs associated with the move, as part of a program to cut costs and dispose of surplus assets.
Ms. Medina, the United spokeswoman, said that United tried to buy all the pilots' annuities in 1985, as part of a plan to terminate the pension fund and take out the surplus assets for business purposes, but that the pilots' union had blocked it.
Acquired surplus assets marketplace Imark.com last March.
Thus, we started exchanging our surplus assets for what we needed.
