Those who hate smoking and gambling may not automatically think of booking their holidays in Las Vegas. But the ultimate “non-gaming, non-smoking” luxury is exactly the sales pitch of the 1,500-room Vdara hotel, part of Las Vegas’s new $8.5 billion CityCenter complex.
Who goes to Las Vegas explicity not to gamble? Surely there is a limit to the number of Elvis impersonators, caged tigers and quickiemarriage newlyweds looking for a luxury hotel? No wonder Dubai World, Vdara’s major investor, is tottering on the brink of collapse.
The wider ironies are inescapable. While the Vdara’s guests are forbidden from having a flutter, the hotel complex itself represents one of the last great punts of the now burst credit bubble. Small bets might be banned, but staking the house (or the hotel) was a prerequisite.
In fact, anyone who wondered during the financial crisis about the distinction between mere gambling and professional banking can now use the Vdara episode as their primer. A private individual who loses his own money is a reckless gambler. But staking the nation (literally, in the case of Dubai World) on a massively risky property deal makes you a master of the Universe who has temporarily fallen upon rotten luck.
So even those who aren’t tempted to book into the Vdara hotel should take care to remember its name. The Vdara is the perfect metaphor for our weird economic times. A smoke-free, nongambling Las Vegas hotel that could bankrupt a country? It brings a whole new dimension to Keynes’s remark, “When the capital development of a country becomes the by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done.”