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Yup, the Coca-Cola example is bad, as it was a brand never valuated in the market. However, the reasoning holds for many other assets. Think of an office tower.

• notahacker 10y ago
  There's a simple enough reason for that: there's no confidence interval on the firm's tax obligations. The firms specialising in asset valuations the firms use as independent justification for their accounting values are usually more than happy to provide confidence intervals or upper and lower bounds[1], and equity analysts are more than happy to note that a large portion of a company's valuation comprises assets sitting on their balance sheet that might be vulnerable to a sharp drop in valuation in a downturn. There's a sizeable haircut (essentially the lower bound of the lenders' accepted confidence interval) applied on any assets a firm tries to use as collateral too. Just because the retail investor isn't presented with a nice little table of upper and lower bound measurements on a firm's balance sheet doesn't mean it isn't taken into account in a publicly listed firm's price. And ultimately, if a firm is more vulnerable to uncertainty about values of its assets than uncertainty about how big its future revenues might be, it as bigger issues than the clarity of its accounts.