Usually when a company flip-flops on its strategy and retreats from an investment, the move is accompanied by losses or write-downs of hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.
Packer has done a lot better than that. By some accounts he has quadrupled Crown's money in Macau (which goes to show that owning a casino is always a better bet than playing in one) and is likely to earn a profit of a few hundred million on the land Crown owns in Las Vegas thanks to rising US property prices.
Packer is selling half of Crown's 27.4 per cent stake in the Macau casinos for A$1.6 billion. Some of the cash he will use for a share buyback, some he will use to pay down Crown's debt and A$500m will be returned to shareholders as a special distribution.
As the 48 per cent owner of Crown, Packer will receive about A$240m from the special distribution.
He has also signalled that he plans to sell Crown's remaining stake in the Macau casinos, so he and his shareholders should get their hands on another A$1.6b.
The deal makes sense because investors perceived risk in Crown's overseas investments and this was weighing on the share price. And as the detention of his staff showed, doing business in China is a lot more unpredictable and difficult than at home. China confirmed last month that of the 18 people detained in October, three Australians have been formally arrested. It has been reported that one Chinese national has been released on bail.
Likewise, Packer is also breaking out some of Crown's property assets - the casinos themselves - into their own listed vehicle. Like Crown's foreign assets, these were also weighing on the share price, so that should help Crown extract more value from its holdings.
What will emerge will be a smaller, but stronger Crown, with its casino and hotel interests confined largely to Australia. The company will have a much stronger balance sheet to support its A$2b development of Crown's six-star hotel and casino complex at Barangaroo on the Sydney Harbour foreshore.
In respect Packer has followed in his father Kerry's footsteps. While the Murdoch family expanded to Britain and the US, Packer snr successfully confined his media empire to Australia.
Packer looks as if he will be starting 2017 in good shape.
Big money
What sort of money do Australia's criminals prefer? Do they exchange brown paper bags full of A$100 notes or is it rolls of A$50 notes wrapped in rubber-bands that our "underworld figures" pass around?
The Federal Government wants to withdraw the A$100 note from circulation, arguing they are greasing the wheels of criminal activity and the black economy.
In Australia, there are some 328 million A$100 notes on issue, worth nearly A$33b.
The A$100 note is, at least in theory, a lot more common than the humble A$5 now, of which there are just 170m, and the A$10 note, of which there are only 120m.
Yet many Australians can go years without ever having a A$100 note in their wallets or purses, which raises the question of where they all go.
The Government hopes that by withdrawing the notes from circulation, it would put a dent in the black economy.
The Reserve Bank of Australia, however, takes a different view.
It says the A$50 denomination - rather than the A$100 - tends to be preferred by criminal elements because of its ubiquitous use in legitimate transactions.
Hence, the RBA casts doubt on the Government's plan to recall the A$100 note to stop criminals using them, saying "any phase-out may not be particularly disruptive to those engaged in such activities".
The RBA argues that doing away with the A$100 note would cause more inconvenience to those who use them for legitimate purposes.
We might have expected the rise of electronic transactions to overtake cash, but cash is still the most popular method of payment in Australia, accounting for 47 per cent of consumer payments by number in 2013.
Either way, the black economy is expensive. Also called the cash or hidden economy, it accounts for 1.5 per cent of GDP, or A$21b, which is money that goes untaxed and therefore represents significant revenue leakage.
