Most important, those who held the irredeemable obligations, with their guaranteed, decade-after-decade stream of payments, faced one crucial restriction: the kind of debt that is known technically as illiquid. It couldn’t be transferred to another person, and it couldn’t be sold or bought in Exchange Alley’s secondary market. That meant if owners of an irredeemable needed the capital tied up in their investment in government debt, and not just their yearly interest payments, they couldn’t get it.
