{"id":5184,"date":"2010-11-21T13:58:24","date_gmt":"2010-11-21T21:58:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/?p=5184"},"modified":"2022-04-06T06:44:40","modified_gmt":"2022-04-06T14:44:40","slug":"harrahs-furtive-friday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/harrahs-furtive-friday\/","title":{"rendered":"Harrah’s: Furtive Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Two days after sending CEO Gary Loveman<\/strong> out to change the conversation by hollering at the assembled masses in an inchoate G2E<\/strong> address, Harrah’s Entertainment<\/strong> quietly scuttled that much-talked-about IPO, evidently for fear it would be under-subscribed. Since the stated intent of the offering<\/a> was to finish the Octavius Tower<\/strong>, build a shopping mall just off the Strip, and underwrite Harrah’s share of two Ohio<\/strong> casinos, this leaves any number of question marks hanging in the air. The company still intends to go ahead with the Caesars Entertainment<\/strong> rebranding (to use up stationery acquired when it took over a Hilton spinoff of that name?), although for the moment that’s like spritzing perfume on oil spill.<\/p>\n

Since Harrah’s agreement with the majority owners of the moribund Foxwoods<\/strong> casino project in Philadelphia<\/strong> hasn’t progressed past a nonbinding set of terms, that prospect suddenly looks very bleak. (Unless you’re a rival city like Johnstown<\/strong>, in which case your chance of landing a casino license just improved.) Harrah’s had a lot riding on that IPO, turning Friday’s furtive revelation into a serious question about how the company intends to keep its myriad commitments.<\/p>\n

As for the basic private-equity stratagem — “They bought companies with only a slim layer of equity cash up front, piled on debt, paid themselves dividends and attempted to sell them back to the marketplace<\/em>.” — leaving its ethics (like phony “dividends”) aside, it’s amazing so many takers could be found for that pig in a poke. Nowadays, $10 billion here and $9 billion there actually looks like real money — with apologies to the late, great Sen. Everett Dirksen<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two days after sending CEO Gary Loveman out to change the conversation by hollering at the assembled masses in an inchoate G2E address, Harrah’s Entertainment quietly scuttled that much-talked-about IPO, evidently for fear it would be under-subscribed. Since the stated … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[28,104,7,71,95,9,38],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5184"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5184"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30991,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5184\/revisions\/30991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}