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Governments sell bonds - essentially IOUs - to borrow money from financial markets and in return they pay interest.

A UC spokesman said “it could take several more months” for those IOUs to arrive.

"Christmas time it was just getting beyond a joke. I was going back to the pharmacy, probably two or three times in a month, just to collect the little IOUs and it was getting to the point where that, in itself, was becoming a stress," she said.

That’s the pile of IOUs stored up over the last four decades as payroll tax revenue plumped outstripped annual costs.

The stories read like tone poems, introducing readers to the small-time pistachio grower who lovingly named, and cried over, his dying trees; a grocery store owner who measured the devastation in a growing pile of IOUs; and Galvez and a fellow field hand raking nonexistent weeds, a pantomime to persuade their boss they had enough work to keep them employed.