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 was born in Russia and I moved, my whole family moved to the United States in December, 1991. What's interesting about this, actually, I was not living in Russia. I was living in the Soviet Union, and then literally a month later it stopped, it ceased to exist. The reason we moved to Denver, because my father's youngest sister left Moscow in 1979, and she moved to Brighton Beach. If you watch Moscow on the Hudson, that movie basically describes her life. Joel Bowman:Wow. Okay. Vitaliy Katsenelson:And then she married the Rabbi, and Rabbi had a synagogue in Cheyenne, Wyoming, out of all places, which is, I don't know if there are any Jewish people there, but yeah, that's a different conversation. But anyway, she invited us over. There was an organization that does a lot of good things, actually, not just for Jewish people, called Jewish Family Services. They were in Denver. So my aunt decided that it was better for us to move to Denver than to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and I keep thanking my aunt every day just for that decision alone. Joel Bowman:And so, I believe you were first studying and then lecturing at, was it the University of Denver? Vitaliy Katsenelson: Yeah. Yes. I studied, I got my undergraduate degree and a graduate degree at University of Colorado at Denver. And then I taught finance as an adjunct, which is a fancy word for part-time. So if you are a professor, and if you say part-time professor or part-time lecturer, it doesn't sound as interesting. Joel Bowman:It sounds a little casual. Yeah. Vitaliy Katsenelson:But adjunct, because most people have no idea what it is. Joel Bowman:Right. Vitaliy Katsenelson:And so suddenly, you sound important. So I taught finance for about seven years, and the reason I actually quit, because two reasons. Number one, I absolutely hated the part where I had to give out grades. I loved giving out As. I hated giving out Ds and Fs. And so, I hated that. But the second part is that after you teach the same class over and over again, it gets old. And I realized when I write, I can teach, because every article would teach something, but I don't have to repeat every article. I don't have to repeat this semester after semester, so I can get to learn new things all the time. And so, I quit in 2007, so I haven't taught in 15 years. Joel Bowman:And also, I guess as you mentioned with your Substack and with your Contrarian Edge page, you get to reach a much wider audience than just how many people can fit in the auditorium, right? Vitaliy Katsenelson:Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I can help a lot more people with my writings than just in a classroom. Yes. Joel Bowman:Excellent. We were back and forthing a little bit email-wise, and I'd been reading some of your work recently on the housing market, the US real estate market, and I wanted to kind of get into that, because I think that's, to use a popular phrase, “top of mind” for most people at the moment, with obviously the Fed having met recently. You and I are talking on November the 7th, for our readers' edification, here. But it's been five days since the widely expected rate hike of 75 basis points that I think most people were paying attention to, most people had kind of expected that, but they were paying more attention to the tenor of Mr. Powell's remarks afterwards. He seems to be speaking fairly directly in his remarks, saying that the job of the Fed is not done at present. We're not looking to pause. "Talk of a pause is premature," I think were his exact words. I wanted to get your take on how you think that shakes out in the housing market, because obviously there's a lot of Americans, in particular the middle class, with wealth tied up in that asset class, and you've written that you think it's quite worse than people think. Why is that? Vitaliy Katsenelson:All right. If you look at the housing prices from 1999 to today, they basically went up about 40%. In less than four years, they went up 40%. Most of that increase happened actually over a three-year period. So, the median house today in the United States is about $440,000, probably a little bit less than that, but that's what it was at the beginning of the year. The problem is, those prices were fine from an affordability perspective when interest rates were around a 30-year mortgage at 3%. But when inflation is at 7-9%, interest rates had to go up. Even if the Federal Reserve did not raise them, they would have still gone up, I would argue, because who would've wanted to buy this paper when inflation is 9% and pay 1% or 2%. So interest rates, I think, would've gone up anyway. So, today when the mortgage rate is over 7%, basically if you are a new buyer and you want to put 20% down and you want to buy a house, it's basically going to cost you almost twice as much. Let me just give you a couple numbers. If you bought a house in 2019, or even in 2021, it would've cost you roughly $420,000. Interest rate was 3%, so it would've cost you roughly about $15,000 a year in mortgage payments. When rates go up from 3% to 7.6%, as they are today, now the mortgage payment goes up to $30,000. This is, what's important to understand is that the median American household makes about $75,000 a year. $75,000 a year, or about $60,000 after tax, roughly. So in other words, when interest rates were 3%, it used to consume 25% of someone's income. Today it would consume, if you were to buy a house at today's prices, at these interest rates, would consume half of someone's income. So, housing today is unaffordable. So, what has to happen is that, for the housing market to return to the prices, to return to the affordability of 2019, of 2020, of 2021, they basically have to decline like 30 or 40%. Joel Bowman:Yeah, I saw those numbers, 30 or 40%. I've read those numbers in your write up, and I think for a lot of people that's difficult to conceptualize, because they've been living high on the hog with cheap and abundant credit for so long that they think, “Hey, it's
