"The Wizard of Macau" The Wall Street Journal

[marie meijer]

FYI: Kate O'Keefe penned an interesting story for 12-13-2013 Wall Street Journal. Included: "Macaw has revenues 6 X the size of the Vegas strip" ! WSJ.MONEY "The number of super-rich gamblers is very small and everyone is going after them."Try logging on: The Wizard of Macau WSJ.com

[Vman96]

Interesting read.

[DaBurglar]

Here in Massachusetts we have had an ongoing soap-opera for the past 18 months related to the issuance of three (3) casino gaming licenses statewide, two for eastern massachusetts (i.e. BOSTON), and one for western mass (my neighborhood, in the greater-Springfield area, home of the NBA Basketball Hall of fame.) Some of you perhaps have read how the newly formed MAss Gaming Commission has been somewhat zealous in its questioning and investigating of established casino giants, like Caesars, Wynn, MGM, Penn National, Mohegan and a few others.....they gave Caesars the boot due to their excessive unsustainable debt.   Steve Wynn has called them a lot of things in the press, none flattering. Anyhow, a lot of the issues of the remaining players, especially Wynn and MGM center on the business in MAcau, which clearly operates on principles and ethics different than anything we see here in the USA.   Everyday the local papers publish articles about MAcau and how companies like WYnn and MGM attract the handful of "super-rich" chinese gamblers from the mainland, where in fact gambling on the mainland is itself totally illegal!   Something obviously fishy is going on but the argument goes, from WYnn and MGM and others, "what else are we supposed to do????"    Its all pretty sordid on some level, and yet on other levels it is much ado about nothing.  In spite of all this, as of today, Wynn has been approved for a gaming license and so has MGM....there is one more hurdle to overcome, and then wynn will build a 1.5 billion dollar resort in the town of Everett, and MGM will build a 800 million hotel-casino in SPringfield, about 9 minutes from my house.   the third casino will be somewhere south of boston but who it will belong to is still up in the air. It is really hard to imagine how a place on the other side of the world, Macau, could impact the decisions and influence the fate of business here in the oldest commonwealth (after Virginia) of the United States.   The world is a small place indeed......

[BillyJoe]

Here in Massachusetts we have had an ongoing soap-opera for the past 18 months related to the issuance of three (3) casino gaming licenses statewide, two for eastern massachusetts (i.e. BOSTON), and one for western mass (my neighborhood, in the greater-Springfield area, home of the NBA Basketball Hall of fame.)
 
Some of you perhaps have read how the newly formed MAss Gaming Commission has been somewhat zealous in its questioning and investigating of established casino giants, like Caesars, Wynn, MGM, Penn National, Mohegan and a few others.....they gave Caesars the boot due to their excessive unsustainable debt.   Steve Wynn has called them a lot of things in the press, none flattering.
 
Anyhow, a lot of the issues of the remaining players, especially Wynn and MGM center on the business in MAcau, which clearly operates on principles and ethics different than anything we see here in the USA.   Everyday the local papers publish articles about MAcau and how companies like WYnn and MGM attract the handful of "super-rich" chinese gamblers from the mainland, where in fact gambling on the mainland is itself totally illegal!   Something obviously fishy is going on but the argument goes, from WYnn and MGM and others, "what else are we supposed to do????"    Its all pretty sordid on some level, and yet on other levels it is much ado about nothing.
 
 
In spite of all this, as of today, Wynn has been approved for a gaming license and so has MGM....there is one more hurdle to overcome, and then wynn will build a 1.5 billion dollar resort in the town of Everett, and MGM will build a 800 million hotel-casino in SPringfield, about 9 minutes from my house.   the third casino will be somewhere south of boston but who it will belong to is still up in the air.
 
It is really hard to imagine how a place on the other side of the world, Macau, could impact the decisions and influence the fate of business here in the oldest commonwealth (after Virginia) of the United States.   The world is a small place indeed......
Well, the vote is in for Md...

MGM wins bid for new Md. casino
This afternoon, in a 5-2 vote, the Maryland Video Lottery Facility Location Commission awarded the state's final casino license to MGM Resorts International, which has proposed a $925 million casino at National Harbor, south of Washington, D.C. The Las Vegas-based company went up against Greenwood Racing and Penn National Gaming for the license. The Washington Post (tiered subscription model) (12/20)

[DaBurglar]

yep, south of D.C.......one more nail in AC's coffin.   the walking dead will refer to AC itself before too long..... even if I won a all expense paid trip to macau, I would not go......that place is vegas on steroids, and I personally find much of vegas a real turnoff due to overbuilding, over-hype, over-stimulating and overdone.   being surrounded by communists on a weekend binge away from the politburo is not my idea of a goodtime......  Lousy commies, always trying to mess with our precious bodily fluids.....

[Minn. Fatz]

We must not have a mine shaft gap!

[DaBurglar]

We must not have a mine shaft gap!
  classic satire indeed......the infamous "missle gap" of the 1950s and early 60s, where rightwing conservatives and idealogues like General curtis lemay INSISTED (without any solid evidence) that the USSR was way ahead of the USA in terms of strateguc ballistic missles, was used as justification and basis for MASSIVE arms buildups by the USA and NATO, spending untold billions to address a shortfall that never existed.   In fact, the USA was so far ahead of the USSR in terms of strategic weapons (missles and bombers) from 1958 thru 1967 that we enjoyed close to a 35 to 1 superiority in warheads (that could actually be delivered to a target.) It was the military industrial complex, the business that benefitted from military spending, that propagated the whole "missle gap theory."     When George C Scott utters the line u cited, "Mr President, we cannot ALLOW a mine shaft gap...." it was the classic thinking of the time ...... Dr Strangelove is one of my top 5 films of all time

[Tedlark]

  I could go off on a tangent about the link between military funding and the sciences but I'm afraid of the size that the post would be. Plus I really don't want to stray off topic, even though digital computers were only one of the benefits of military funding, and, we all know that computers in video poker machines are rigged.