Hadn’t thought about that, but then I know zilch about the running of a casino.
If the casino was run as a self-contained business, then yes the casino’s account sheets would have to show a liability of $1 Million in unredeemed chips, which would need to be balanced by an asset of $1 Million cash recieved. However the casino was part of Trump’s larger corporate empire, so whatever accounting mechanism that moved revenue from the casino to the corporation could simply move both the asset and the liability to the larger corporation’s account. In the short term the million bucks was liquid capital, and if Trump Inc. went bankrupt the liability would be just one more unpayable debt.
Casinos are (usually) so profitable that if their owners go bankrupt somebody with deeper pockets almost always steps in to assume ownership and cover the casino’s liabilities- such as redeeming chips. The point being that the chip scheme was a way to (nearly) guarantee that the entire amount of the “loan” could be recovered regardless of what a bankruptcy court might rule.
Okay, I did not realize that Donald owned the casino in question. This now makes a little bit more sense. Without Donald owning the casino, the whole story sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory I would have heard from one of my stoned dorm mates about the CIA using AIDs to bring down <insert group here>. Now the story makes some sense.