What a Business
Steve Wynn, chairman and CEO of Wynn Resorts, is a man who knows how to build and grow casinos. His father ran bingo parlors. Over the years, Wynn built (and sometimes sold) the Golden Nugget, the Mirage, Treasure Island, the Bellagio, the Wynn, Encore; all in Las Vegas; and the Wynn in Macau, a territory re-acquired by the People’s Republic of China in 1999. The CEO “considered moving the company’s global headquarters to Macau” in 2010. Until now, he has stayed put, but his July 18, 2011, Wynn Resorts investor conference call showed Wynn remains restless.
He told investors the “Obama administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I could prove it…I could spend the next three hours giving you examples of all of us in this marketplace that are frightened to death about all the new regulations,[as] our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right, [with a] President that…keeps using that word ‘redistribution.’”
Wynn’s pitch was not partisan: “I am a Democrat businessman….I support Harry Reid…[but] I am telling you that the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. Until he is gone, everybody is going to be sitting on [his] thumbs.
“[I]t is Obama that is responsible for this fear in America,” Wynn insisted. “The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and [the need] to do something to businesses that don’t invest, that are holding too much money. You know, we haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody is afraid of the government and there is no need soft-pedaling it. It is the truth. It is the truth.”
The [Chinese] State Administration of Foreign Exchange stated on July 20, 2011: “We hope the U.S. government will earnestly adopt responsible policies to strengthen international market confidence, and to respect and protect the interests of investors.”
Steve Wynn might have written the same words.
It is a strange time in financial history when a Democrat CEO heaps disgust on a U.S. President from the same political party. It is an even stranger time when Communists feel the need to remind Capitalists to “protect the interests of investors.”
Regards,
Comments: