Steve Wynn doesn’t think much of the blogosphere. And I agree with him on this point. In many cases, would-be pundits’ reach exceeds their comprehension. From the LVRJ:
Wynn, who controls 24 million shares of the company’s 111.8 million outstanding shares, is bullish on the future, not only for Wynn Resorts but the gaming industry as a whole.
“We have had recessions, two or three of them, and we’ve lived through them,” Wynn said. “The difference now is that we have all these Internet bloggers and half-assed observers. Seventy percent of what they write is total bullshit and total fiction. The market right now is stinky and volatile. I preannounced because I didn’t want to be restrained if I wanted to buy some shares. I’m not saying I’m going to buy, I just didn’t want to be blacked out.”
When your stock is outperforming virtually everyone else’s in your sector, your opinion probably counts more than that of any observer, half-assed or not.
I’ve been saying exactly what Wynn said here for months now. But many of the journalists I talk to don’t want to hear it. They want someone to say that the sky is falling. Well, it isn’t. As I said right here, Las Vegas has been through much worse.
But that’s impossible! People say. It’s never been this bad because (energy prices, broader economic downturn, credit crunch, mortgage meltdown, or whatever)….
Then I counter with a solemn reading from Ecclesiastes (1:8-9):
8. All things are wearisome; no one can utter it; the eye shall not be sated from seeing, nor shall the ear be filled from hearing.
9. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
As I’ve said a million times before, some people are going to lose money, some people are going to make money. Projects will be finished, projects will be canceled. New casinos will open, old ones will close. And there will be growth in the spring.
What annoys me most is the fuzzy reporting: stories about how many people “believe we are in a recession” are bandied about as proof of dire economic times. But a recession is a well-defined event: two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. That hasn’t happened yet, so we’re not in a recession. I’m not saying that people aren’t having hard times, but no matter how high the unemployment rate goes, we’re not in a recession until we have those consecutive downturns.
Maybe someone should invent a new term for an economic downturn with rising unemployment, shrinking credit, and positive growth. For all I know, someone has. Hey, before Jimmy Carter was president, no one thought that an economy could simultaneous stagnate and suffer high inflation, but we’ve now got “stagflation” in our vocabulary. Even the automatic spell-checker agrees.