Classified by the degree of equitability, total assets include circulating assets, long-term investment, fixed assets, intangible assets and deferred assets, and other assets.
Perhaps this is because, as the industrial age gives way to the digital age, the intangible assets that increasingly matter are not easy to put a value on.
As AI automates tasks across industries, companies are increasingly shifting their focus towards intangible assets such as creativity, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence.
In other words, saying that the profits it was making were because its management had superior skill to all other executives and therefore that was an intangible asset.
Because capital and intangible assets are highly mobife, they lend themselves to pure tax arbitrage-which strives to allocate profits not for greater economic efficiency, but merely to cheat the tax collector.