[DelaneyM]

The value people produce is an asset. After all, you don't own people, you buy their effort.

A contract can be an asset. Usually the unrealized future value of the agreement has value should you need to make a deemed disposition (or have some other valuation event). It gets very obviously complicated and fuzzy though, which is where accountants make the big bucks. It's pretty rare that a company chooses to make a contract valuable, but it often comes up in bankruptcy proceedings.

As an example of contracts having value, a few years ago I was involved in the acquisition of some media distribution assets, and one such asset was a transferable "MFN" contract with a major publisher. That was a very, very valuable asset.

[piperswe]

Another instance of contracts having value: bonds and options are just contracts, and it would be insane to consider a bond to not be an asset.