What's the Incentive for a Corporation to Own Assets?

A corporation would like for various reasons to separate itself from assets. So it can still play with those assets, but it does not actually own them. The reason they didn't want to own that stuff was that there are these rules about how much risk you can take on into your bank. If I've got this asset out there at arm's length and I'm creaming money off it, then if the housing market collapses, I just say goodbye, let it go and it doesn't affect my balance sheet. It's one of these quite devious things. And it's not entirely connected to tax havens. But in the global financial crisis, one of the first banks to fall was the