But it would have been worse had the purchase gone ahead. In March 2009, the Cannery deal had to be canned at a cost of almost $500 million. The city now has the highest home foreclosure rate in the USA, one of the steepest declines in house prices, and one of the highest rates of unemployment, with one in eight people out of work. In January 2008 Las Vegas was hit by the worst downturn in its history, which has seen revenues on the Strip decline for 19 months in row. So was it ever a good deal? "No," says Randy Fine bluntly. Announced just as the markets began to slide, it was seen to be expensive even then. Mr Packer's and Crown's biggest bet, worth $2.7 billion when it was made in December 2007, was to buy Cannery Casino Resorts, which owns three suburban casinos in Las Vegas and one in Pennsylvania. Many others got beaten up pretty deeply as well." "He bought at the peak, there's no question about that. I don't think it was a good time to be handing out the billions of dollars. "It was a good time to be receiving the billions of dollars. So how smart was it to be buying back then? "It wasn't smart," says Randy Fine, who runs Fine Point Group, a leading casino consulting firm in Las Vegas. It was in July 2007 that two Bear Stearns hedge funds in New York went spectacularly bust. The bulk of this money, around $1.3 billion, was lost in Las Vegas, but there have also been setbacks in Canada, the UK, Russia, Singapore and Macau.Īll Mr Packer's bets in Las Vegas were made between May and December 2007, at a time when America's sub-prime mortgage disaster was already under way and the global financial crisis was brewing. The total damage to Mr Packer and his shareholders in Crown Limited, according to tonight's ABC1's Four Corners, comes to nearly $2 billion. But since his father's death in 2005, James Packer has been making far bigger, billion-dollar bets, building and buying casinos around the world. Kerry Packer was notorious for losing millions of dollars on the gaming tables of the world.
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