"You look at the revenue stream potential, how will this asset perform within its market over the long haul?
Since some assets performed very well, they covered the losses incurred by other low-performing assets.
He contends that the logistic companies, which do not own such tangible, freight-moving assets, perform better in a slowdown.
Bolted joints are ubiquitous in engineering assets, performing a critical role of transferring loads among interconnecting components.
Thus, while assets performed much better in 2003 than in 2002, giving in 2003 still reflected the depressed asset values of 2001 and 2002.
Conversely, if the assets were sold at 30 cents, taxpayers could wind up making a profit on the purchase if the assets performed better than expected over time.
Among Yale's asset classes, marketable assets performed relatively well, with absolute return, domestic equity, foreign equity, and fixed income in aggregate declining by 13.1%.
It's no surprise, therefore, that many chief executives opt for assumptions that are wildly optimistic, even as their pension assets perform miserably.
If the assets perform better than expected, there is a modest upside for taxpayers; if they perform worse, the wipeout could far exceed whatever gain taxpayers could ever have hoped to realize.
Then there are investors who think they are doing the right thing by spreading their money across different asset classes without understanding that those assets perform the same way.
