Capital charges are higher for commercial property than for homes but banks can still be seduced by the apparent stability of a real asset producing predictable cash flows.
"A reverse mortgage is one way of making a very large asset produce income".
That's the worry among shareholders who have waited patiently to see this prized 45%-owned US asset produce dividends.
And will baseball and sports in Chicago continue to be valued assets producing impressive revenue streams across time?
For all the inequities, when vast wealth has been made through these structures, it has been in cases where the underlying assets produced more cash, not less.
The burden on the taxpayer would be too great.But, as already noted, financial wealth is just a claim on the assets produced by the economy.
Similarly, Amgen, the largest holding in Mr. Kaul's portfolio on March 31, at 18.3 percent of assets, produces a raft of sought-after treatments, including the arthritis drug Enbrel.
Issues such as collecting, handling and using the data of the asset produced during the asset's lifecycle in a lean and efficient manner are on top of today's research.
The mining field is one of Australia's greatest mineral assets, producing huge quantities of ore (Australia, the world's largest exporter of lead in the early 21st century, extracted most of its recorded production of lead from Broken Hill).
That asset will generate $10 a year in revenue, is depreciable at a constant rate over a period of 20 years (i.e., the asset produces depreciation deductions of $5 per year) and will be sold at the end of year five for $90.
Everything else, from the commercial paper issued by investment banks and purchased by money-market funds to the AAA-rated tranches of subprime CDOs, is just pretending to be "safe .The volume of these "safe" assets produced by the private sector is currently much larger than the outstanding stock of genuinely safe assets.
