In a park at the heart of old Macau, three men in their 20s, wearing tracksuits and expressions of great concentration, juggle plastic cocktail shakers in a baffling flurry of patterns.

When they clatter to the floor, the trio scream abuse at each other. It is an uncomfortably tense time in Macau. All three men have dropped out of university to seize a dream job behind a bar in one of the casinos: but not only is their act far from perfect, the construction of the bar they hoped to work in has stopped.

Standing in a sea of silent building sites, Macau has become the lates, probably glitziest, victim of the credit crunch. The work that ground to a halt last week was on sections five and six of a huge casino development for which the Las Vegas Sands Corporation run by Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire, had borrowed heavily. Funding problems mean the future of the complex is in the balance.

The dread sweeping through Macau and its once irrepressible investors is that the gambling town's woes do not begin and end with Mr Adelson's financial problems. He may have allowed the creation of a “Vegas of the East” to snowball into a vast, unfundable mess, but there are many others who have bought into the same vision, and have the vast, half-finished building sites along Macau's reclaimed seafront to show for it. In a worst-case scenario, say analysts, Mr Adelson's miseries are just an early symptom of worse carnage to come.

Behind the warnings of the pessimists are serious questions about Macau's future revenues. Income from gaming has grown nearly 30 per cent in the past year, but did so while Macau wallowed in a golden era of liberal travel rules, roaring economic growth and soaring wage packages that has now abruptly ended.

At the official level there are clear signs that confidence is slipping. Edmond Ho, the chief executive of Macau, used his annual address last week to declare that the Government would take over any bankrupt casino. Analysts in Hong Kong said the comments suggest that the authorities have come to view the casinos like Wall Street banks, as edifices on the brink of implosion.

Like everyone in Macau, the would-be cocktail waiters practising in the park do not know what will happen next. The real clues are, for good, practical reasons, impossible to read. In the public gaming rooms of the big casinos, the gambling fever from which Macau visitors suffer so acutely still seems to grip its victims. Even the slot machines, never dominant in Macau, still have their devoted feeders. But it is not these noisy, blaring dens that built the Macau “miracle”. The real money is moving around behind the closed doors of the VIP rooms, whose occupants represent 80 per cent of Macau's gaming income. Macau's future turns on what is happening at its invisible tables.

Many believe that after its astonishing growth over the past four years, Macau will now behave as a straight proxy for mainland Chinese consumer sentiment. The chief threat in the current conditions, say analysts, arises because Macau's development tracked the general market excitement about Chinese economic growth. American and domestic investors and casino operators were mesmerised by a mouth-watering array of numbers. 100 million Chinese live within a three-hour drive of Macau, and, judged the developers, they all know the odds of rolling a nine at Sic Bo, one of the most popular casino tables among Chinese.

Steve Wynn's Macau casino and hotel makes about five times the quarterly operating income of his Las Vegas flagship, but with less than a quarter of the hotel rooms. In one corner of that property is a branch of Louis Vuitton which, until last month, raked in more money than any of the brand's concessions anywhere else in the world.

But as sub-prime calamity has morphed into the threat of global recession, the neighbouring province is reportedly seeing factory closures at the rate of 20 per day. Tens of thousands of workers are being laid off, and even if they were never Macau's target audience, the VIP gaming tables will soon be losing the custom of the factory's senior management. On top of this, travelling restrictions imposed by Beijing in the autumn are about to hit the high-roller market hard: mainland visitors will be limited to just six visits per year. Alas, the development of Macau has proceeded as if everyone in China would be free to satisfy a universal gambling itch.

Looming menacingly over the entire Macau story is the single critical figure of 1.4. That is the number of nights, on average, spent by visitors to Macau. The tens of billions invested in Macau, especially by the likes of Mr Adelson and the other Las Vegas operators who arrived when the monopoly of Stanley Ho, the local gambling kingpin, was broken in 2002, assume that the critical number of nights stayed will reach 3.5.

Luring Chinese men to the gambling tables is no great challenge, even in a downturn. But persuading them to bring the family and stay for a week could be a ruinous challenge.

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