Fatal Conceits Podcast Bonner Private Research

Welcome to Episode #78 of the Fatal Conceits Podcast…
They’re sometimes called “California refugees.” But they hail from New York and Illinois, too…
You’ll find them in sleepy little towns in Florida… Texas… Arizona… Nevada… and across the sunbelt… basically anywhere that doesn’t suffer oppressive taxation, creeping government, woke school curriculums, high crime, homelessness, drug epidemics…
The pandemic didn’t birth this trend, but it sure did accelerate it. Presently, California is losing about 370,000 people per year, a record rate.
In today’s program we’re joined by MN Gordon, editor and publisher of the Economic Prism newsletter and former California native. Earlier this year, Mr Gordon packed up his family and headed east to find his own American Bolt Hole. We begin today’s discussion with his fascinating story… then talk about Opendoor - as both an idea and a company - and what’s next for real estate in the US.
Please enjoy our discussion and leave your own comments and ideas regarding the best places in the US to live below…
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
P.S. For those inclined to read rather than listen, please find a lightly edited (for clarity) transcript below…
Thank you for reading Bonner Private Research. This post is public so feel free to share it.

TRANSCRIPT:
Joel Bowman:All right. Well, welcome back, dear listeners, to the Fatal Conceits Podcast. As you know, by now, it's a show about money, markets, mobs, and manias, not necessarily in that order. If you've not already done so, please head over to the Bonner Private Research substack page. You can find us at bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com, where there are now hundreds of articles on everything from high finance to lowly politics and everything in between. There's plenty of research reports there, of course, by our macro analyst, Dan Denning and investment director, Tom Dyson, as well as plenty of Bill Bonner's daily musings. You won't find them anywhere else.
And in addition, of course, there are many more conversations just like this on the Fatal Conceits Podcast. Grab that at the tab on the top of the page. And speaking of which, I'm delighted today to welcome a newcomer to the show. Mr. MN Gordon is the Editorial Director and Publisher of the Economic Prism Newsletter. I'll provide a link in the transcript to this, so you can head on over there. In particular, check out the library. You'll find plenty of usual suspects from Messrs. Hayek to Hazlitt to Mises, and all the rest of those free market oriented kind of gentleman. So, without further ado, Mr. MN Gordon, welcome to the program.
MN Gordon:Hey, Joel. Morning. Thanks for having me on.
Joel Bowman:Yeah, not a problem. Not a problem. Now, we've got so much to talk about, as is the case whenever we sit down these days. We had the remarks from Mr. Powell yesterday. There's real estate to discuss, credit markets, the dollar, on and on. But one thing I wanted to start with here is a story I read over on your Economic Prism website, and I think it's really instructive. I think a lot of people in America are thinking along these lines at the moment, and that is your exodus story from California. Why don't you just kick us off by telling us a little bit about how you got out of the Sunshine Tax State?
MN Gordon:Yeah, you bet. Yeah, I'm a native of Southern California, born and raised there and worked for many years there in my career. And over the years, it just became more and more intolerable of a place to be. Certainly, the high taxes and wacky politics have always been a part of California, but it really turned ugly or just more and more intolerable during the COVID lockdown that had taken place.
And my wife and my kids, we were just eager to get out and try something else and look for a place that maybe has a lighter touch from the government, more favorable tax policies, lower cost of living. So, we certainly found that in Knoxville, Tennessee. We moved out h

Welcome to Episode #77 of the Fatal Conceits Podcast... 
In today’s conversation, I’m joined by author, value investor, student of life and editor of the popular ContrarianEdge newsletter, Mr. Vitaliy Katsenelson. 
I’ve been reading Vitaliy’s work, on and off, for over a decade now. In fact, we used to publish his columns and market insights occasionally in The Daily Reckoning, a publication I managed for Bill Bonner back in the 2000s, in what seems like another lifetime...
Vitaliy describes himself as “Born in Russia, Made in America,” a distinction we talk about during our conversation. He’s also a professor of finance, CEO of Investment Management Associates and a keen world traveler. 
Over the course of an hour or so, I asked Vitaliy about his insights into the beleaguered American housing market, what the Fed hath wrought for the US economy at large, the challenges facing bottom up value investors like himself and where to for stock markets over the short and medium term. 
We also talk about his newly published book, Soul in the Game - The Art and Meaning of Life.
Please enjoy - and share! - my conversation with Vitaliy Katsenelson, below...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
TRANSCRIPT:Joel Bowman:All right, well, welcome back to another episode of the Fatal Conceits podcast, dear listener. If you've not already done so, please head over to our Substack page. You can find us at BonnerPrivateResearch.Substack.com, where we have hundreds of articles, research reports, and many more conversations just like this on the Fatal Conceits podcast tab at the top of the page, where we talk about everything from high finance to lowly politics and everything in between.
It is my pleasure today to welcome a gentleman to the show whose work I've been reading on and off for years, and as we were just talking about before we pressed record here, our email correspondence has gone back over a decade, so it'll be great to connect again. Vitaliy Katsenelson is the author of Contrarian Edge. Head over to his website there. He's got plenty of excellent material, mostly about investing, but a few life lessons in there, some political musings, lots of travel stuff. He's also the author of two investing books, Active Value Investing, and the Little Book of Sideways Markets, and most recently, a book that I hope we get to chat about today, Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life.
So, first of all, Vitaliy, welcome to the Fatal Conceits podcast. I feel like it's long overdue.
Vitaliy Katsenelson:I know, Joel, it's a pleasure. Thank you. We're looking forward to it.
Joel Bowman:Outstanding. And as we were also just mentioning, if this background looks familiar, you were recently on a podcast with Anya Leonard, who runs the Classical Wisdom website. We sit about 10 feet away from each other. Being husband and wife, we share a home office, so if this is a little bit of deja vu...
Vitaliy Katsenelson:Absolutely. Yeah. No, that's still there.
Joel Bowman:All right, so there's lots of stuff I want to get to, Vitaliy. You covered such a wide breadth of subject matter in your musings, and again, people should head over to Contrarian Edge to check out your work there. But for readers who are just coming upon your work for the first time, I think they might be interested just in a bit of a Vitaliy origin story, because it's a very interesting one. You put it as “Born in Russia, Made in America,” which I thought was a very entertaining juxtaposition. How did you make that journey and come to that distinction?
Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yeah, so today I live in Denver, and I have a wife and three kids, and I run a value investment firm, IMA, and I also write, and I wrote several books, but I write articles all the time. And by the way, we have a Substack as well, so you can just look for my name on Substack. You can subscribe to the articles.
Joel Bowman:I'll put all the links to these links in the transcript.
Vitaliy Katsenelson:Perfect. Yeah. But I

And now for some more Fatal Conceits…
Welcome to Episode #76 of the Fatal Conceits Podcast, dear listener, a show about money, markets, mobs and manias.
All eyes were on the Jay Powell’s Fed this week, specifically the chairman’s remarks following the much-expected 75-basis point rate hike.
Word was that the central bank will “continue to do what needs to be done to get the job done." Actually, they were JP’s exact words.
“The job” to which Mr. Powell refers is, of course, to get inflation back to the 2% range.
What does that mean for stocks and the dollar in the near term?
What does it spell for America’s already-toppy housing market, the pillar of middle-class wealth?
And how will gold respond? The Midas Metal popped more than $50 on Friday. (Silver was up even more, doubling gold’s advance in percentage terms.)
For answers and insights, I spoke with Bonner Private Research’s macro man, up in Laramie, Wyoming, Mr. Dan Denning. Over 45 mins or so, we covered all of the above, plus BPRs Trade of the Decade, the coming Winter Catastrophe, 2022 Redux, and why you should panic now (in an orderly fashion, of course) and beat the rush.
Please enjoy our conversation and, as always, like, comment and share our work with friends and family far and wide.
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
Thank you for reading Bonner Private Research. This post is public so feel free to share it.

TRANSCRIPT:
Joel Bowman:All right, well welcome back to another Fatal Conceits podcast, dear listener, a show about money markets, mobs and manias. If you have not already done so, please head over to our Substack page. You can find us at bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com with hundreds of daily articles now on everything from high finance to lowly politics and a ton of in-depth research reports, many of which were authored by none other than my guest today, Bonner Private Research's, macro man up in Laramie, Wyoming, Dan Denning. Dan, welcome to the show. How do you do, mate?
Dan Denning:I'm doing all right. It's dark and cold and gloomy here in Laramie as winter approaches, but that's kind of how it feels like in markets right now, so I suppose that's appropriate.
Joel Bowman:Yeah, exactly. We're talking off camera just now and you were firing off emails this morning at around 5:00 AM. I'm imagining it was still well below freezing at that point up there?
Dan Denning:Yeah, it was supposed to snow this week, but it hasn't, which is good and it's been nice and sunny, but it has been something we've been paying attention to both behind the scenes and when we're writing to the readers, because as it gets colder in the US, we're dealing with this 32% drawdown in the strategic petroleum reserve and then these reports of impending or possible diesel shortages so you're kind of trying to separate what's fact from fake, I suppose, and go beyond what's in the news reports to see if it's actually impacting truckers and travel prices and things like that. So we, Bill, last year, penned a winter catastrophe and we had bad winter last year, but I think it could be worse this year and as you know, because you're organizing it, we're going to address that in early December.
Joel Bowman:Yeah, that's December 13 for our readers, listeners and viewers, I guess now that we're doing this on YouTube, but I'll pop a link down below where you can get some more information about registering for that event. As you mentioned, Dan, we're doing a bit of behind the scenes work just to get that all organized. It's going to be the 2022 Winter Catastrophe Redux, which will be more well attended than our first one, given that it was the inaugural event and we had just a few hundred readers on that very first call with Byron King and Rick Rule, but yeah, as you mentioned, the second one looks to be shaping up to be quite the event. Of course, it's the kind of thing that you don't want to be right about, a coming winter catastrophe, but that looks like what's on the plate an

And now for some more Fatal Conceits…
“I mean, look, you seriously couldn't make this stuff up and it really is banana republic stuff, frankly. It's embarrassing and they just need to get a grip.” ~ Robert Marstrand on the sorry state of British politics.

Welcome to another episode of the Fatal Conceits podcast, dear listener. In this conversation, Episode #75, we catch up with UK-born investor and fellow Argentine resident, Robert Marstrand. Following his career as an investment banker at UBS, where he worked out of London, Zürich and Hong Kong, Robert joined forces with Nigel Farage to create UK Independent Wealth, a financial research service aimed at helping folks in the UK reclaim their financial independence. (Find out more about his work here.)
Over the course of a half hour or so, Rob takes us through the Shakespearean tragi-comedy that has been the past few months in UK politics… from the ousting of Boris Johnson… to Liz Truss’s spell as the shortest serving Prime Minister in the nation’s history… to the unelected appointment of Rishi Sunak… (or is it, as President Biden has it, “Rashi Sanuk”?)
Thrills and Spills
As with all such soap operas, there’s plenty of betrayals, backstabbing and upsets along the way… from the death of a monarch to generation-high inflation to plenty of turmoil in the markets, including a near catastrophe in the UK bond market… and a very embarrassing situation for the Bank of England itself…
As always, feel free to leave your comments below and to share this episode with friends on both side of The Pond.
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
Thank you for reading Bonner Private Research. This post is public, so feel free to share it with Kings and Queens alike...




This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/subscribe

And now for some more Fatal Conceits…
“I think those people at the Nobel Committee must have a sense of humor,” quipped Bill Bonner, in response to the questionable judgement that resulted in Ben Shalom Bernanke being awarded the Nobel Prize for economics earlier this week.
“They're either very dumb or very cynical,” Bill continued. “And I'm not sure which it is because, if you remember that time, Ben Bernanke was wrong about everything. And no major issue came to him that he was not wrong about.”
Alas, 14 years after Mr. Bernanke’s preposterous “we may not have an economy on Monday morning” speech, in which he presented one of the most galling false dichotomies of the modern era (pass this unprecedented – and lately unread – stimulus bill… or the sky will fall), and we are now reaping the whirlwind of his profligacy.
Over the course of a half hour or so, Bill shared with us his thoughts on the end of the Age of Abundance, the reason our current financial predicament differs greatly from what Volcker faced in the ‘70s (Hint: It begins with D and rhymes with “regret”) and why those born after 1980 cannot know, first hand, what a return to the “Old Normal” will entail…
All that and plenty more on Ep #74 of the Fatal Conceits podcast. Please enjoy and, if you have a moment, share with a friend…
Also, if you’re interested in purchasing some of Bill’s wine, which we talk about towards the end of the episode, their Tacana 2020 vintage is now available to select buyers.
The first half of the allotment (reserved for the Bonner Wine Partnership’s private Tacana buyer’s list) sold out in a day. The rest probably won’t be around for long, so if you want to grab a few bottles… for the cellar or the bunker… don’t dilly-dally. More information here:
And for those of you who are less audio-inclined, you’ll also find a full transcript of today’s interview, below. Until next time…
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
Thank you for reading Bonner Private Research. This post is public so feel free to share it.

TRANSCRIPT:
Joel Bowman:
Welcome back to another episode of the Fatal Conceits Podcast dear listener. It's the show, as you know, about money markets, mobs and manias. If you have not already done so, please head on over to our Substack page. You can find us at bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com.
On that page, you'll be able to find hundreds now of essays authored by today's guest, Bill Bonner, in the daily section. We've got plenty of research reports from Dan Denning and Tom Dyson. And of course, many more conversations like this under the Fatal Conceits Podcast tab at the top of the page. So without further ado, I think you can probably see in your screen there, framed by gilted cornices, remnants of a bygone era of abundance, Mr. Bill Bonner, welcome to the show. How do you do sir?
Bill Bonner:
Thank you Joel. It's a pleasure to be with you.
Joel Bowman:
You're up there in Baltimore at the moment, that's correct?
Bill Bonner:
In Baltimore. And you're right, it is the bygone remnants of an ancient civilization. Baltimore was by the way, the richest city in America in say the early 19th century because it had such a great harbor. And it was also connected, through the Cumberland Gap, it was connected to the whole Ohio Valley and all that area over there on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains. So it was a big important port for people coming from Europe and a big important port for people making mostly food things that they exported it to Europe. And people got rich. And movies from say the 1920s or so, maybe a little bit later, they will frequently have a rich person as somebody from Baltimore. And that all seems so unlikely now. It's hard to even imagine.
Joel Bowman:
To be rich like a Baltimorean is like to be rich like an Argentine.
Bill Bonner:
Same thing.
Joel Bowman:
Exactly. And I'm racking my brain here, but how on earth were they able to get rich without ESG governanc

And now for some more Fatal Conceits…
When the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged last week (Sept. 26), we immediately fired off an email to energy and resource investor, geopolitical expert and all round man of letters, Byron King.
Regular listeners (and readers) will recognize Byron as the man who called out “Germany’s Energy Stalingrad” during our Winter Catastrophe summit. That was back in December of 2021, when European technocrats were still guffawing over suggestions that their green pipe dreams and over-reliance on Russian gas might present some problems in the near future…
Fast forward to… well, the near future… and lo! Energy prices have gone parabolic on the continent as nations scramble to “weaponize” every strategic advantage they have, be they cubic feet of gas, global supply chains or greenbacks…
Byron responded almost immediately… despite the fact that he was at the time kicking rocks deep in the heart of Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountain range on a mining expedition.
We caught up with Byron as soon as he landed back in the US to get his take on what’s happening over in Europe, and what it could mean for folks on both sides of the Atlantic as ol’ General Winter enters the fray.
We hope you enjoy the conversation…
Cheers,
Joel BowmanHost of the Fatal Conceits Podcast
Thank you for reading Bonner Private Research. This post is public, so feel free to share it with comrades and compatriots alike...

Joel Bowman:
Well, welcome back to another episode of the Fatal Conceits Podcast, dear listener, a show about money, markets, mobs and manias, not necessarily and certainly not always in that order. If you haven't already done so, please head over to the Substack page, at BonnerPrivateResearch.substack.com. There, you can sign up for plenty of daily articles from Bill Bonner. We also have lots of research reports courtesy of Dan Denning and Tom Dyson, and of course, many more episodes and conversations just like this under the Fatal Conceits podcast tab at the top of the page.
It's my pleasure to welcome back to the show today a long-time friend. Mr. Byron King is an energy and resource expert, the editor of the Lifetime Income Report, and all-round man of letters. Mr. King, welcome back to the show, sir. How do you do?
Byron King:
I'm doing very well. Greetings, thank you. And thank you, everyone out there who's watching, listening, reading the transcript, whatever. Appreciate it.
Joel Bowman:
Always a pleasure to have you on, Byron. I always feel like you've probably forgotten more about whatever our given subject is than I may ever know. So, thanks again for taking the time. You and I were catching up on the state of the world recently while you were on tour down in a rock-and-mineral-kicking expedition of some sort, down in the heart of Mexico. How was your trip and what did you find?
Byron King:
Oh, well, thank you for even bringing it up. Yeah, I went to the legendary Sierra Madre of Central Mexico. Most people, when they think of Sierra Madre, they think, “Oh yeah, the Humphrey Bogart movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, where these desperados are out there and they're fighting over gold and whatever, and in the end, everybody kills everybody else and the gold dust blows away in the wind.” It's a real morality tale there. But there really is a Sierra Madre, and it is a really, really rugged range of mountains in Central Mexico, pretty much just south of Texas. And it extends, oh, I don't know, 800, 900 miles south. There's the Gulf Coast of Mexico, then there's the Pacific Coast of Mexico, and then there's this big mountain range in the middle, and that's the Sierra Madre.
And it is an extension of the Rocky Mountains, and it is filled with minerals, and people have been mining great stuff there for literally 500 years. And I visited a company, I'll just name the name because it's a publicly-traded company. It's a nice company, Avino, A-V-I-N-O, silver and gold. And they