And no, there are no line in an IFRS balance sheet for "human capital".
[edit] and on your second point, I don't think I agree. You will pretty much always find a buyer for financial assets. Unless they are so rotten that no one thinks they are worth what you have them in your books for (which may be the case for some Italian banks).
Where I think you are right to be careful with banks is with the size. If you need to wind down a massive international bank, you need to find buyers for a awfully large amounts of assets, and that will likely damage their value.
Yeah, we are on the same page, it was just a little nit as it seems weird to me to state that future revenues are the "pure" base for valuation when future is informed by current. Just semantics though.
> You will pretty much always find a buyer for financial assets. Unless they are so rotten that no one thinks they are worth what you have them in your books
At the right price you will find a buyer for anything. I was speaking to your point about liquidity, which is not about price of the asset, but about the quantity of interested buyers and the ease of structuring and executing a transaction with a buyer.
But size is a problem. When you have 2 trillions $ of assets to sell, even if they are simple vanilla mortgages, it will be a buyer's market.
Not sure what your objection is. The function is something like V = 3 * r, where V is the value of the company and r is the annual revenue. Boom, pure function.
Most banks hold a decent amount of highly specialized, illiquid debts that have no active market and could reasonably be compared in terms of liquidity to real estate or capital goods.