A banker or broker who gathered up these things from small tradesmen at ninety cents on the dollar made a fine thing of it all around if he could wait.
Originally, in all probability, there was no intention on the part of the city treasurer to do any one an injustice, and it is likely that there really were no funds to pay with at the time.

However that may have been, there was later no excuse for issuing the warrants, seeing that the city might easily have been managed much more economically.

But these warrants, as can readily be imagined, had come to be a fine source of profit for note-brokers, bankers, political financiers, and inside political manipulators generally and so they remained a part of the city's fiscal policy.
There was just one drawback to all this.

In order to get the full advantage of this condition the large banker holding them must be an "inside banker," one close to the political forces of the city, for if he was not and needed money and he carried his warrants to the city treasurer, he would find that he could not get cash for them.

But if he transferred them to some banker or note-broker who was close to the political force of the city, it was quite another matter.