I'll present a hypothesis which, like most of my hypothesis, I don't necessarily believe.
What if Mt. Gox is making a boat-load of money (which I've always suspected to be true) but their biggest source of grief is AML (which I also expect true) and it is complicated by a lot of legacy customers who are a bit shady and not vetted in the same manner as newly verified persons.
The way to make money in this business is to take the low hanging fruit. In this case, that would be the obviously clean people who are speculators and what-not. As a corollary, one could gain an extra competitive advantage over one's adversaries by foisting the problem children off on them. This would not be unlike the calculus which appears to network providers who are probably not exactly broken-hearted when a bandwidth hog gets pissed and switches service providers.
Anyway, a good way to lose some undesired baggage would be to go through a protracted period of 'problems' in getting people their money. Or at least certain groups of people. That is what I would do if I were running things, and also why I have no desire to be running things.
A more likely hypothesis is that Mt. Gox is simply struggling mightily with mainstream financial institutions, regulators, and law enforcement.
The least likely hypothesis in my mind is that Mark is running out of capital unless he has kind of a world-record appetite for hookers and blow.
You think exchange volume is from a few thousand speculators circle jerking nickels off each other? Gox makes their nugget off those shady legacy customers. They couldn't afford to lose them, and they have as a result of this fincen/AML bullshit. Now we're just watching the inevitable resulting implosion. They staved it off with a shitload of insider trading on LTC, but that was a prop and is going up in smoke after being played too hard. They have nowhere else to turn.
I don't know if Karpeles is up to the task or not, but I'll bet that he at least had something of an NSA-lite (and particularly rich) trove of data on a lot of people. Most are likely garden variety crooks, but not all. I think a lot of people have played in the Bitcoin market over the years, and some of them are likely in the 'protected class'. If Mark can and does play that card he can likely end up situated wherever he likes as the Bitcoin ecosystem moves forward.
Oh ya, from what I can glean (and/or invent in my paranoid fantasy world) the real Bitcoin activity happens in dark pools and generally opaque systems. So you are right to characterize Mt. Gox activity as 'a few thousand speculators circle jerking nickels of each other.' But partaking in these circle-jerk sessions from time to time is probably a useful (if messy) means to achieve certain objectives for a lot of the real players. Or at least has been at an earlier time in the formation of the ecosystem.
