The stock market is at record highs, unemployment is at record lows, we are now officially in the longest uninterrupted economic expansion in the history of the United States, and the Nevada gambling market continues to be in the longest recession in its history.

Economic statistics don’t mean much of anything on an individual level or sector level. It’s mostly just a statistic that investors use to guess everyone else’s next moves, and politicians use them to pat themselves on the back and justify taking a bigger share of it all. If you’re making less money this year, you’re in a personal recession regardless of what the aggregates say. If you’re making more but the stuff you buy is getting more expensive even faster, you’re still in recession and how the statistics are doing is irrelevant. This is the case for the Nevada gambling industry, too. For 11 years now, Nevada has yet to break to new highs in gambling revenue, even as the consumer price index (CPI) has risen by 20% since then.

Peak Nevada occurred way back in 2007, with $12,480,790,793 in statewide gambling revenue. Over the next three years, gross gaming revenue in Nevada fell by 20.6% overall for the biggest sustained decline since statistics were recorded. Over the next 8 years, revenue has clawed back 17%. At this rate, it’ll be another 4 years until we hit the 2007 highs. My bet is we’re not going to make it back there before the next decline takes hold, and even if we do, adjusted for price inflation we’d have to clip off 20% from 2007 dollars to 2018 dollars. (CPI at the beginning of 2008 was 212.174, compared to 255.155 now). By the time we reach the nominal high in 4 years at the current rate, we’ll probably have to clip off another 10% at least. Like a hamster on a wheel running after a moving target (is that a thing?), full recovery for the Nevada gambling industry looks to be out of reach.

In comparison to any other recession since the 1970’s, the last one was by far the worst for Nevada. It’s not even close. In 2001 after the tech bubble burst, Nevada gambling revenue fell 4.3% peak to trough, but was back to new highs by 2004. Following the recession of 1990-1991, we didn’t even see a fall in annual revenue. We saw sluggish growth at only 1.3% in 1992 compared to the year before of 11.3%. But still the industry kept growing. If we want to move back even farther we have to move to Clark County Statistics, because the Center for Gaming Research only goes back to 1984. The double dip inflationary recession of 1980-1982 was rough, with Clark Country gambling revenue climbing only 16.7% in three years while price inflation exploded 25.64%. Clark County didn’t overcome the slump adjusted for inflation until 1985 despite an 18.9% rise in visitors over those 6 years.