House of the Day: 70 Adelphi Street

Heck, I’d LOVE to live there….if I smoked dust.

Too expensive. The tiny footprint is one step up from a shack. My Goodness! Kokoran is really nuts!

On another note…maybe I’ll spraypaint our entire house interior high-hiding white (floors, walls, ceilings, stairs, etc.), throw everything out and get a couple of floor cushions from IKEA. Voila! Tiny rooms expand to 1-point-whatever-dollars.

In a nutshell…Americans believed that the good times would never end…that their home ATM would never be tapped out…and that the credit would always be EZ and plentiful. That, as we all know, is not the case. Just take a look at soaring foreclosure rates and loan defaults.

Now we see this false sense of euphoria spilling over to the stock market. As we mentioned last week, two of the United States’ biggest banks, Citigroup (NYSE:C) (NYSE:UBS) said they were writing down $9.3 billion in debt because of the credit crunch, and the markets reacted with glee! In fact, the Dow hit a new record high on the news.

“Why this apparent insouciance?” wonders the Economist. “Because it seems investors can’t lose.

“‘Take your pick,’ says Gerard Minack, a strategist at Morgan Stanley: ‘Equity markets are either behaving as if the worst is over for credit and housing problems or they remain convinced that the [Federal Reserve] can offset whatever bad news may unfold.’ In other words, bad economic news means the Fed will cut interest rates and good news means recession will be avoided.”

So, what category does Friday’s BLS data come under? It looked like good news at first glance, but, like most things, when you dig a bit deeper…the truth comes out.

“The jobs report is bogus,” opines Addison at The 5 Min. Forecast. “If you suffered through the BLS official site, for example, you’d find they allow themselves a margin of error of 129,000 jobs. Any deviation less and you’re in an area that statisticians called insignificant ‘noise’.

“‘September jobs data cannot be believed,’ alerts our government stats watchdog John Williams, helping us to unpack the Labor Department’s methods.

“‘The Bureau of Labor Statistics can bring in the monthly payroll gain anywhere it wants to. And the Administration knows that a number in a certain range – that can be dismissed as statistical ‘noise’ or revised away the next month – will move the markets as effectively as a Federal Reserve policy action.

“‘Accordingly, when I suggested last month that the 4,000 jobs loss reported for August was designed to help push the Fed into its easing, one indeed has to wonder what is going on in the background, when August revised to an 89,000 jobs gain in the September report. One might read the current September 110,000 jobs ‘gain’ as a sign the Fed can hold steady at the next meeting, rather than taking action that would tumble the U.S. dollar further.'”

Also, the place is fairly tiny. Good job of staging the interior, though. It certainly doesn’t look like anyone actually lives there. Too clean and uncluttered!