Macau casino revenues continue to slide

Year on year monthly revenues from games of fortune in Macau casinos have declined for an unprecedented third month in a row.

Either players there are all of a sudden getting luckier, or (more likely) they are just playing less. And the rate of change seems to be excellerating: June was down 3.7% on June 2013, July down 3.6%, and now August down 6.1%

The June/July fall was blamed on the World Cup distraction. This reasoning doesn’t apply for August.

Interestingly, the changing trend in Macau seems to be moving in concert with China’s property market. There, figures from the China Real Estate Index System show that after a long period of uninterrupted increases, monthly average new home prices declined 0.3% in May, 0.5% in June, 0.8% in July and 0.6% in August. These are month to month falls, not year on year comparisons, but the general story is the same.

Possibly unrelated. Possibly not.

It was said that the year of the horse promised fluctuations in prices and general chaos in all things financial. Maybe they were on the money.

Someone else once said, “what goes up, must eventually come down.”

Definitely changes brewing in the Middle Kingdom.