Asset Sales

In general, an asset sale involves the sale of something a business owns. Rather than selling company stock (which represents ownership stake in the full company) or selling the company outright, the firm might sell something it controls, like a product line or a brand or a manufacturing facility.
There's a specific sense of "asset sale" that comes up frequently as well. This involves the sale of loans by a bank.
The term has a particular meaning in the financial services industry because when banks (and other similar institutions) make these kinds of sales, there's complicated accounting ramifications. How a deal is structured affects how it is treated on the balance sheet, and the term "asset sale" represents a particular designation about how a divestiture can get recorded. All of this of course is very different from ass sales for which you'd need to see your local Donkey Dealer.