Macau

Excerpts from an interesting article at The Guardian:

You won't find the Paiza Mansions on TripAdvisor. You can't even book the world's plushest hotel – it chooses you. The 6,000 sq ft suites (the size of five semi-detached houses) are reached by private elevator, and come with two butlers and a masseur. Yet it costs nothing to stay there. The surprisingly tasteful suites (despite the 60in end-of-bathtub TVs) are completely free. There's just the small matter of a HK$10-15m (£800,000-£1.2m) that invitation-only guests are required to spend downstairs at the casino.

The Paiza Club and Mansions are part of the Macau Venetian, the world's largest casino, and the fifth biggest building on the planet. And every time you buy something with a Made in China label, much of the money eventually ends up here.

Las Vegas is puny in comparison. Chinese punters bet around £70bn on Macau's baize tables (they prefer baccarat) last month alone. This year it could reach £1tn, an almost unimaginably colossal sum. Think of all the cash issued from all the UK's ATMs last year. Then multiply it by five...

The other rather less acknowledged factor is money-laundering. The junkets take in Chinese renminbi (which cannot be converted on the world's money exchanges) while the casinos can pay out in dollars. Some critics believe Macau is a gigantic operation for secreting money away from the eyes of the Chinese state. Suitloads of dollars take the short hop from Macau to Hong Kong, much of it pouring into the city's white-hot property market. Even bigger sums are believed to head into offshore tax havens. The authorities, for now at least, turn a blind eye. The casinos are a huge cash cow for the Chinese state, too, which levies tax at 39%...

Macau's casinos are the world's most profitable – some repay billion-pound construction costs within a year.