Thanks tehdos. I suppose I'm not too worried about liquidity at this point, as I'm not looking to sell soon; I just want to buy BTC for the first time with fiat money. The IOU is what you have anytime you put fiat on an exchange if I understand, and there isn't really any other way if you want to just buy some BTC with USD on an exchange. The issue I was having is the difficulty of actually getting my fiat onto BitShares. I thought once I verified my account and linked m bank account it would be a simple transfer, but it's not and the next step isn't very clear, since there's no instructions on what to do.

Why am I having such a hard time with this? I'm a new user and after creating my bitshares account I went to deposit fiat funds to my wallet. I followed the directions in the BitShares UI, which led me to type my bank account info that I would be using to supply a fiat transfer. I waited.... and waited... eventually OpenLedger verified my account. Excellent! I figure I'm ready to go! I open BitShares and under the deposit tab for fiat USD there's now a deposit button. I press it. It asks for the dollar amount. Great! NOPE! When I click OK it gives a dialogue window "click here for deposit instructions", and the word here is a link that does nothing. By dragging it to my desktop I discover it's a PDF file with account info...? So now that I've verified my account it's not as simple as transferring fiat into my account? What on earth do I do now? Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you.