You talk like a coming-out divorce ‘upends’ a family in some unprecedented way. People get divorced all the time. Families reconfigure, children adapt, adults survive. Get a grip.
No. Divorce ruins the lives of the kids. Look at the statistics. The outcome and financial damage and emotional damage is horrid.
The problem is more that it’s normalized. I think the normalization is wrong. Similar to how North Korea normalized poverty. Marriage should be taken seriously and divorce is extremely serious. The fact that you think of it as nothing is whats out of touch.
That isn’t the asset valuation, that is the range of assessments interested parties make with respect to asset value. Because market clearing transactions are rare in many asset markets, those extremely high variance estimates of asset value are all you have to work with. It is only marginally better than no information at all. Too make matters worse, the rare transactions in these markets frequently have a lot of complicated structure such that the nominal price is not reflective of the underlying value.
tl;dr: Many assets have no meaningfully assessable fair market value. These are investments with extremely long and indefinite time horizons before the asset value can be assessed in a reasonable way. You can look at it as a peculiar type of risk capital portfolio with an extraordinarily long time horizon.