No Hats

Dress code strictly enforced. No hats, oversized jeans, baggies or athletic wear.

There's a new luxury hotel in Las Vegas. It's called Encore and its proprietor is Steve Wynn. I stumbled upon the verbiage looking at his website - he's got a nightclub there called 'Tryst' and he's trying to set the scene.

Something like 68% of American GDP is the consumer economy. The surest way to get any multipliers via economic stimulus is to give cash to Americans and let them spend it in the normal ways they do - which would include wasting it in Las Vegas. Surely Steve Wynn doesn't need to expand - it's already done. He got the financing he needed for his new resort and casino so the crunch doesn't affect him so much. But if nobody shows, he'll start laying off staff and then the real painful part of the recession will begin. That's the great irony here. If the stimulus package doesn't come before people start getting laid off, it's just going to be welfare - keeping people alive between jobs, which won't come because nothing will have been stimulated, except perhaps pay-per-view.

Wynn sure picked a bad time to be exclusive. I think a lot more people are going to be wearing denim in the days to come.