Thanks to a wise Macanese court, a patently ridiculous $12 billion litigation against Las Vegas Sands has been postponed for another year. That may sound like a real relief, but given that the chances LVS would ever be forced to pay such a ludicrous sum are essentially zero anyway, the news is really nothing more than a yawn. This is especially so in the current environment where Macau’s economy has contracted by an unfathomable 61% last quarter, numbers akin to an Independence Day-style alien invasion.

It’s not even that these numbers are entirely COVID-19 related either. Macau’s economy, at least as measured by GDP, has been contracting for 6 straight quarters now. COVID-19 appeared to catch it in the middle of an already year-long downturn.

Even if LVS loses eventually, any sum actually rewarded will be insignificant, and that’s assuming that the current monetary system even survives another year. There are signs out of Macau itself that it may not. Why is Macau relevant to this question at all? Because Macau’s economy is a convenient microcosm of what happens when you are almost entirely dependent on a single industry or export. For Macau it’s gambling. For the United States, it’s dollars, the main and most important American export to the world. Yes, America is also a banana republic in that sense.

Yes, Macau may have a very sophisticated, luxurious, top-tier banana that the world’s super rich just love to snack on, but a banana republic is still what it is.