Checking the pulse of the Las Vegas economy
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2025
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Las Vegas is facing a months long decline in tourism, partly due fewer international visitors to the United States overall. So is Las Vegas dead? “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio went to find out. He joins Kimberly on the show today to share what he’s hearing from business owners and tourists about the city’s economic slump.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- "Sin City tourism slump signals wider economic slowdown" from Axios
- "An Empty Strip And Fewer Tips: Is Las Vegas In Trouble?" from Time
"Las Vegas is hurting as tourism drops. Are Canadians behind the Sin City slump?" from CBC News
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:13.3 | The U.S. tourism industry is going through a rough patch. The World Travel and Tourism Council said international tourism spending in the U.S. |
| 0:21.9 | is expected to fall by over $12 billion this year because there's a lot of people who maybe |
| 0:28.8 | used to come here that didn't and even domestically folks are feeling a little bit iffy on |
| 0:33.6 | travel. And this decline is really showing up in tourism hotspots like Las Vegas. You may have |
| 0:40.1 | seen headlines about the struggling Vegas economy or videos of an eerily quiet Las Vegas strip. |
| 0:47.4 | My colleague David Brancaccio, who you will well know as the host of Marketplace Morning |
| 0:52.2 | Report, is on the ground in Vegas right now talking |
| 0:55.1 | to folks about the city's economic slump, and he's here to share what he's hearing. |
| 1:00.8 | Hey, David, welcome to the show. |
| 1:02.4 | Hey, there, Kimberly. |
| 1:03.6 | Just don't call you Kim. |
| 1:04.8 | Nice to talk to you. |
| 1:07.2 | It's so strange talking to you in the afternoon. |
| 1:09.9 | I always talk to you in the morning for your show. |
| 1:12.9 | I know. I'm never up in the afternoon, actually. It's the darnest thing. But here I am in a moderately priced Vegas Hotel. |
| 1:22.1 | So what are you seeing? Is Vegas really dead? Or what's the vibe like? |
| 1:27.2 | You know, our digital friends like to think in ones and zeros, binary. |
| 1:31.8 | The actual economy is not ones or zeros. |
| 1:34.9 | It's not either or. |
| 1:36.4 | I got to tell you that the convention business, a big part of the economy here, is doing pretty well this year. |
| 1:43.0 | And the bookings for next year, not bad at all. |
... |
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