re: #101 Gus 802

Blech. I drove through Vegas. My friend lives there so I spent several hours there with them. I didn’t say anything to him but damn what a mess. Old broken down highway running through the middle of town. Ugle buildings everywhere. Dirty streets. Bail bondsman, fly by night attorneys. Lots of poverty and crime too. You would think that will all of that money it would be otherwise. But this is the American way. Huge profits over societal interests.

What huge profits? Here’s a site with a graph of casino stocks vs. the overall market. Note that casino stocks are, well, a gamble. Right now, they’re tanking relative to the market as a whole. volatile stocks

Trump Entertainment Resorts went bankrupt. broke

This same site has a table over on the upper right, giving Friday’s (August 5, 2011) stock results. On a day when the DJIA went up, almost all the stocks are down. One is down 27%.

Property values have collapsed in Las Vegas. Cities with burgeoning business don’t rank number 1 in the category of worst drop in housing prices.

Today’s economy is not producing happy, flush, confident bettors who imagine that their luck in the real world will translate to luck at games they can’t possibly beat for long.

Such confidence is always misplaced, but right now, it’s just about nonexistent.

Neither is there much of a supply of people who just want a lark and don’t much care if they lose. People with money they might have had to burn have already lost gut churning sums of home equity and 401K value.

Las Vegas is getting poor because willing, gaily indifferent losers are what fueled the growth of Las Vegas, and they’re just not around in the numbers they used to be.