Its not just intellectual capital and intangible assets that often run afoul of the accounting valuation rules. Here is a case of a financial assets with similar problems (from Bloomberg):
National City Corp., the Ohio bank whose market value fell 70 percent this year on investor concern that capital may run short, has a $1 billion stake in Visa Inc. that doesn't get counted on its balance sheet.
National City gained $532 million by selling Visa stock when the credit-card company went public in March and still holds 19.7 million Class B shares, according to an August filing by Cleveland-based National City. The stake is probably worth about $1 billion and is carried at zero because sales are restricted, Treasurer Thomas Richlovsky said.
As Richlovsky points out, if the bank needed to raise capital in this stock, they could find a way. Yet the accounting rules don't account for that -- for probably good reasons. None the less, how these "difficult-to-value" assets are treated is a major problem throughout the business world. Maybe we can all get together to find a solution that will encompass all asset classes, including intangibles.
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