Several seemingly different topics will be woven into a single article, as the headline for today clearly reflects. The remarks about monopolists in Part I will be from author and anti-trust thinker Matt Stoller. The Golden Age vs. Stone Age is inspired by but not a quote based on a remark shared by a source with ties to MHARR which will be considered in Part III. The Department of Energy (DOE) rule news in Part II is a press release by the Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform (MHARR), which has no counterpart on the Manufactured Housing Institute (a.k.a. MHI or among some in MHVille “the Institute”) website at the time this article is being drafted (pre-dawn 4.24.2025). Indeed, as the screen grab here will reflect, MHI has posted nothing added which they curiously call “news” since April 7, 2025, as if nothing has happened that impacts or involves manufactured housing for over 2 weeks. Curious, right? More on that in Part IV, which will consider some useful pull quotes from sources as shown that will provide as well as unpack added facts-evidence-analysis (FEA) that will be viewed through the lens of the arguably artificially diminished 21st century manufactured home industry, a.k.a. MHVille.
As a teaser for Part III. There are those in manufactured housing that consider the potential for the manufactured home industry to address the affordable U.S. housing crisis to be quite in line with the second term of President Donald J. Trump (sometimes a.k.a.: T2) as leading to a new golden age for manufactured housing. For example, when MHARR, in an official statement linked here said that they think that manufactured housing can and should seek to align with much of the Trump agenda that is to say that leaders in that sphere believe that manufactured housing is capable of a robust comeback that could rival or exceed the last high in 1998, or perhaps even the even higher peak achieved in the early 1970s. A half a million new HUD Code manufactured homes or more per year is not out of the question, believe some in the MHARR camp, as has been expressed by an MHI leader too.
The potential to rapidly double or triple the size of the manufactured home industry’s output is a historic fact. As capital access is a key, some of what Stoller said on that topic may be useful. To see the graphic below in a larger size, in many devices and browsers you can click here and follow the prompts (the plus sign) for easier reading. The annotation are as usual added by MHProNews.
So, for investors or those who seek the insights of what the potential from an investment perspective is for manufactured housing one takeaway that will be considered in Part IV is this. Given a common estimate that some 7 plus million housing units are needed to close the gap or shortfall in what MHARR pages of their posts refer to as “inherently affordable” manufactured housing.
The double use of the term “economist” in the opening paragraph of Matt Stoller’s 4.24.2025 missive via his Big newsletter is in the original, as are any other typos or errors. For our steady numbers of newcomers to MHProNews, such items by Stoller or other sources are presented with understandable caveats by this publication. For example, Matt Stoller – the author of Goliath and the Big newsletter – has long been from the political left. Meaning in part that Stoller tends to favor Democrats over Republicans. A typical tendency on the left (especially leftists vs. classic liberals) is that President Donald J. Trump is at or near the top of the ‘most hated’ Republicans. That said, Stoller arguably attempts to make an effort to present a mix of objective information with some of his own opinions and views. So, bias must be kept in mind, but that doesn’t mean that everything he says is ‘wrong.’ It means the ancient principle of separating the wheat from the chaff ought to be applied.
Some of what Stoller says can be keenly insightful – for example, the “economic termites” phrase – but it may be sandwiched between bits of fluff, error, or bias. But as is often our practice in presenting third-party content under fair use guidelines, there is something worth knowing or it wouldn’t be presented by MHProNews at all. Facts. Evidence. Analysis.
That said, Stoller tends to grasp the importance of the impact of monopolistic practices and how consolidators often operate. Highlighting in what follows from Stoller is by MHProNews.
As is typical, each of these elements of today’s report will have some common or interrelated touchpoints. That will be considered along with others in Part IV. Grab your favorite beverage or snack suitable for this time of day that you are reading, and let’s dive in, shall we? The water may be brisk in some parts of the U.S. at this time of year, but that can prove to be refreshing and life giving.
Part I
How Monopolies Could Exploit the Tariff Shock
Donald Trump’s tariff choices have already had significant impacts on small businesses, who can’t deal with shocks. Economic termites could feast, and price gouging and fixing could accelerate.
A few days ago, Federal Reserve economist economist Ricardo Marto published an important paper on what happened to the economy in the period after Covid struck. What he found, after crunching numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, is that there was massive redistribution of wealth upward, from working people to big business.
 |
According to Marto, domestic non-financial corporate profits doubled, to $4 trillion a year. As a percentage of total economic output going to profits, they went from 13.9% to 16.2%, while the labor share modestly declined.
There are two other disturbing elements in the paper. First, these profits went to reward shareholders in the form of dividends, not to investment to build more capacity. And second, profit levels have remained elevated. Throughout the pandemic recovery period, economists were vehement that profit increases did not reflect increased concentration, and that increased profits were temporary. Yet this research shows that such assumptions were wishful thinking.
Indeed, the most serious domestic policy failure of the Biden administration was allowing their economists to aggressively avoid addressing this shift upward in wealth from working people to big business. And now let’s fast forward to the current moment. We are in a trade crisis, and this crisis has some echoes of the post-Covid supply chain mess. And I suspect Donald Trump might be repeating Biden’s mistake.
This new crisis, of course, is the one that’s been wrought by Trump’s own abrupt tariff policies. One of the big problems with planning in business right now is that Trump keeps changing his position on tariffs. Three weeks ago, Trump’s essentially initiated a hard de-coupling with China, with tariffs so high at 145% that trade just stops.
The U.S. is dependent on our economic relationship with China, which many businesspeople have noted. “The trade war is setting up a supply chain disaster that could dwarf the chaos during COVID,” said Mike Beckham, the CEO of Simple Modern, an Oklahoma-based consumer products company. The panic among businesses who rely on imports is pervasive. Already, shipping flows have changed radically. Here’s Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen:
 |
Then, yesterday, Trump seemed to change his position again. He publicly stated he would be slashing China tariffs, though not unilaterally, and that he wants some sort of deal.
This inconsistency is costly. Factories are pulling back based on his comments, investment patterns are changing, and goods are clogging up Chinese ports. Business people don’t know what charges apply to which goods that are being shipped, and they are having to renegotiate pricing on the fly, with no idea how much consumers are willing to pay. Many distribution chains are priced in percentage markups, so a tariff increase can be dramatically magnified to the final consumer price.
The net result is that right now, large numbers of people who own or work at small or medium businesses are in trouble, as they are dependent on imports. While only around of 14% of the U.S. GDP is directly attributable to imports, macro statistics are misleading; virtually every product has components that come from abroad, or are made by machines that come from abroad. There are very few fully Made in U.S.A. items.
And even if Trump reverses his trade war entirely, which he has not said he is doing, we are still going to have impacts from the pullback in trade that has already taken place. And that’s why this situation looks a bit like the Covid supply shock moment. A lot of orders are going to be canceled, and shortages and price changes are going to happen in weird and unpredictable ways. This situation is not identical to Covid, of course, and not just because it’s a result of wholly man-made choices. Supply has not disappeared exactly, it’s just more expensive. There are instances of Chinese monopoly sellers refusing to export to the U.S., so there are going to be some explicit shortages, but it seems like Trump is going to pull back on a full de-coupling.
There’s also a difference in terms of demand. During the Covid shock, consumers shifted their demand preference from things like going to restaurants to buying consumer durables, from office-related goods to home goods. It took time to adjust, even simple things like changing from commercial rolls of toilet paper to consumer rolls of toilet paper. That’s not happening now, consumers want the same things today they wanted last week. Also, consumers have jobs and money right now, whereas in the initial stages of covid the money flow just stopped. They may still pull back in spending; Delta announced a significant slowdown in bookings. But that may be more a gradual slide into slower growth or recession versus the unemployment rate shooting up all at once.
But one serious concern we should have, as Marto’s paper showed, is that shocks in a concentrated economy tend to lead to more monopoly power and profits for Wall Street, and less for everyone else. Since Covid is our best analogy, it’s worth dragging one more data point from the paper. And that is, the sector with the highest contribution to the increase in profit share was retail. As Marto put it, “Profits in the retail trade industry averaged $153 billion pre-COVID-19 and rose to $314 billion post-COVID-19 (or from 1% of national income to 1.5%)”
 |
Now, retail has a pretty broad definition, encompassing everything from supermarkets to hardware stores to car dealers to gas stations to pharmacies. What is the distribution of increased profits in the retail sector? That’s not clear. But my guess is that the little guy didn’t come out ahead.
Take groceries. According to the National Grocer’s Association, super centers and club stores, aka Walmart and Costco, are taking market share. Store closures spiked in 2020, and slowed as stimulus hit the economy, but have picked back up in the past few years. Walmart, by contrast, has tripled in value since March of 2020, and Amazon has doubled in value. And the reason comes from the answer to the following question. Who gets supply when the amount of everything from plastic packaging to shipping capacity is limited?
The Waterbed Effect: Market Power in a Supply Shock
Here’s a letter from Albertsons supermarket, the $76 billion behemoth supermarket giant, to all suppliers. “We are not accepting cost increases due to tariffs,” writes their general merchandising executive. That’s absurd, since the cost of many items is going to spike, and suppliers will go out of business if they can’t cover those increased costs. Yet, the arrogance speaks to the power of buyers like Albertsons. And Albertsons is nothing compared to Walmart or Amazon.
This dynamic creates something called the “waterbed effect,” where suppliers will keep prices low for the big guys and raise them on smaller stores. It also works in the opposite direction, where retailers will force smaller suppliers to give them price concessions while allowing bigger suppliers to hike prices.
 |
 |
If there are shortages, the situation is even worse, because smaller entities just can’t get vital supplies when the big guys are fully stocked. On Organized Money, we recently interviewed Randy Arceneaux, a multi-billion dollar distributor for independent grocers, who told us that they are still having trouble getting access to basic goods like baby formula and bottled water.
The Federal Trade Commission even did an investigation on what happened in the grocery sector, noting that “large market participants accelerated and distorted the negative effects associated with supply chain disruptions.” To some extent there’s now more flexibility after Covid; Arceneaux just started producing bottled water himself, though he couldn’t do that with formula.
But what we saw during the crisis, according to the FTC, illustrates the scope of the problem. Here’s a bit more from the investigative report:
To gain access to scarce products and therefore a competitive advantage, some companies—most often larger ones—used policies that imposed strict delivery requirements on their upstream suppliers and threatened fines for noncompliance. Walmart even tightened the delivery requirements its suppliers had to meet to avoid fines as the pandemic went on. In some cases, suppliers preferentially allocated product to the purchasers threatening to fine them, which may have affected competition between the companies that threatened these fines and those that did not.
It’s pretty obvious who wins in this situation – the big guy. Fortunately, there is a law designed to block this kind of behavior. It’s called the Robinson-Patman Act, which bars selling the same product to big stores versus small ones at different prices and with different terms. Here’s the Supreme Court, in 1948’s Morton Salt decision, making the point.
The legislative history of the Robinson-Patman Act makes it abundantly clear that Congress considered it to be an evil that a large buyer could secure a competitive advantage over a small buyer solely because of the large buyer’s quantity purchasing ability.
That law hadn’t been enforced since the 1970s, so during Covid, Walmart could actually tax suppliers who gave product to smaller rivals. In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission revived the RPA, with suits against the nation’s leading alcohol distributor, Souther Glazier’s, and a suit against Pepsi, for selling on better terms to Walmart. The FTC just won on a motion to dismiss on the Southern Glazer’s case. So addressing this problem is not hopeless, because companies can bring RPA cases themselves. But we’re still early in reviving this law.
Still, there are more reasons why profit share shifted during the post-Covid era.
Price Fixing and Gouging in a Supply Shock
In normal times, pricing changes are subtle, even among monopolists. It’s just socially disreputable to pull a Martin Shkreli. But during disruptions, companies with market power can just increase prices and blame tariffs for it. It happened during Covid. It’s not occurring much yet in this moment, but the seeds for it are being planted. As The Lever reported, pricing consultants are starting to tell their clients to hike prices aggressively, and McKinsey is suggesting that businesses optimize their tariff strategies around where they have less competition so they can fortify their profit margins. Here’s an earlier 2023 presentation from McKinsey on “pricing tech.”
 |
We’re likely to see three different kinds of pricing games. The first is classic price gouging, which is taking an advantage of a market disruption to raise prices far higher than costs increase. Think about the beach stand that sells umbrellas when it unexpectedly starts raining, only apply that across the economy. Sometimes it’ll be hard to figure out whether the cost really is changing, and so the price hike is justified. But sometimes it won’t.
For instance, one of the craziest parts of the new tariff problem is that some of the beneficiaries will be Visa and Mastercard, who will be able to charge 1-3% of each tariff charge for those who have to use credit cards to pay. These payment middlemen raised prices during the pandemic, claiming inflation, but of course, it was just an excuse. There are these kinds of middlemen and economic termites across the board. Nowhere else in the world are payment systems this bloated. There are an endless number of these kinds of extractive business models, everywhere in the economy, from copyrights on regulated standards to industrial gases. I expect price gouging to take place in these industries.
A different game will be price-fixing through algorithms, where companies provide a third party clearinghouse with competitively sensitive data so they can collectively increase prices. This kind of behavior is happening in everything from hotels to pork to PVC pipe to an alleged construction rental equipment cartel. There are a host of cases working their way through the courts on these practices, which are likely illegal, but pervasive.
Finally, we’ll probably see surveillance pricing, where companies increase or lower prices based on the personally identified characteristics of shoppers. Instacart, as the Capitol Forum reported, has a new product called Eversight to allow retailers to test “customized pricing and promotions directly with their individual customers.” Instacart’s CEO Fidji Simo has told investors that this tool helps retailers understand where customers are “price sensitive” and “adjust their prices based on that information.” A tariff shock gives the opportunity for lots of experimentation on selective price gouging, which will be very hard to know is happening</span.. Fortunately, California legislators are moving a bill to ban these practices in retailing, but we need a lot more.
And that gets to the last problem I’m going to cover, which is access to credit.
Cash Is King: Credit in a Supply Shock
In normal economic environments, mergers and business practices lead to consolidation. But during credit crunches or shocks, that’s not really necessary; the big monopolization technique is just to stay solvent while the little guys can’t.
A key mechanism here is the cost and availability of credit. Businesses manage risk by keeping cash on hand or by having access to credit. If there’s a lot of uncertainty, or you need to reengineer a product to exclude a component you previously could get, or you incur an extra cost in the form of a tariff, then you need capital to weather the storm.
Take board games, nearly all of which are made in China. Quimbley’s Toys & Games recently tried making games in the U.S., and couldn’t do so in a cost competitive manner. Eventually they started making board games with fewer bells and whistles. That’s essentially a hidden price increase in terms of lower quality, but it also required reengineering and time. That costs money. Most businesses have fixed costs, such as rent, workers, software, warehousing or production facilities, et al. They can manage for a time with less revenue, but borrowing makes up the difference.
Right now, it’s extremely hard to get financing, and not just for the little guy. Wall Street banks aren’t even lending to private equity firms to do takeovers, big corporations aren’t issuing bonds, there are no initial public offerings, and mergers are dead. If the big guys can’t get money, what hope is there for the millions of businesses that aren’t close to Wall Street?
During Covid, the government stepped in. Led by Senator Marco Rubio, Congress engineered the Paycheck Protection Program, which allowed small businesses to borrow money to meet payroll, and then have those loans forgiven. There was a lot of fraud in the program, but it saved millions of small businesses. Fraud was a trade-off we decided to make to get the program going quickly, because the Small Business Administration wasn’t set up with the staffing necessary, but businesses were freezing up with zero customers.
There are a few reasons a program like this could be better this time around. First, banks are the ones that executed the PPP, and they now have experience with these kinds of emergency loans. So that’s good. Second, the shock isn’t as bad as Covid, and it’s not as sudden. Consumers are nervous, and there are supply problems, but it’s not like all restaurants have to shut down. It’s more a garden variety recession, which means that there’s still revenue and more time to act.
Still, there are two big problems. The first is there doesn’t seem to be much appetite among the Republican majority in Congress to do anything here. And second, the Trump administration has made sure that we don’t really have much of a SBA anymore, cutting 43% of its workforce. DOGE has ensured that if we go down this road again, we’ll have a lot of fraud as the administration is rebuilt quickly on the fly. Theoretically, the government could rehire lots of employees recently fired or put on administrative leave, or grab some from the Federal Reserve.
But it’s all theoretical, because no one in the administration seems to be considering doing anything about the small business credit crisis.
Ok. So What?
It’s a pretty confusing and frustrating time to be thinking and writing about political economy. The tariff crisis is going to slam into our economy in dangerous ways, and large swaths of the necessary governing capacity we need are being liquidated. I expect significant amounts of monopolization and price-related corruption to flourish, and for Chinese governance models to increase in influence globally, perhaps permanently.
Yet at the same time, over the past few weeks, I’ve been going back and forth to my office and the D.C. district court, where two historic antitrust cases against big tech firms – one against Google and one against Meta – are happening at the same time. That’s never happened before – an antitrust revolution in plain sight. That is just confusing. We’re using the rule of law to neutralize the market power of the most important firms in the economy, who in all other aspects are successfully engaged in building market and political power for themselves. That is just dissonant with most other trend lines.
Anyway, all of this is to say things feel pretty pessimistic right now, but the future is unknowable. Trump has many characteristics, one of them is that he can be quite flexible. And this administration is slowly groping in the dark for a different strategy on tariffs, and reaching out for advice to people in business. We may see a useful shift, even if that feels unlikely.
Thanks for reading!
And please send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or comments by clicking on the title of this newsletter. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation and democracy. And consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague, or family member.
cheers,
Matt Stoller
—
Part II
APRIL 23, 2025
TO: MHARR MANUFACTURERS
MHARR STATE AFFILIATES
MHARR TECHNICAL REVIEW GROUP (TRG)
FROM: MARK WEISS
RE: DOE EXTENDS COMPLIANCE DEADLINE FOR TIER 2
MANUFACTURED HOUSING “ENERGY” STANDARDS
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), in a News Release and draft Federal Register notice issued on April 22, 2025, has announced its intention to delay the compliance date for its “energy conservation” standards for Tier 2 (i.e., multi-section) manufactured homes to a date 180 days after the “publication of corresponding enforcement procedures.” The compliance date for Tier 1 (i.e., single-section) manufactured homes, will remain unchanged at 60 days after the publication of final enforcement regulations. A copy of the DOE News Release and draft Federal Register notice are attached.
While this delay is acceptable as a first step toward the retraction of the draconian and destructive DOE standards, it is not sufficient, in and of itself, to remedy the fatally flawed DOE standards development process that led to the May 31, 2022 “final” standards, or the disproportionate, discriminatory and excessive cost burdens that those standards (for both single and multi-section homes) would impose on both manufactured housing consumers and the industry. MHARR has been consistent in its position that the May 31, 2022 DOE standards are unreasonable, unnecessary and would needlessly exclude millions of Americans from the manufactured housing market and from homeownership altogether.
It is, therefore, encouraging that the DOE News Release states, in part, that “this action, taken in anticipation of further rollbacks of unnecessary regulations on the manufactured housing market, is the latest step toward the Trump Administration’s goal of restoring sensible energy conservation standards for American homes.” (Emphasis added).
Consistent with this statement, DOE should – as MHARR has long maintained – withdraw the fatally flawed and defective May 31, 2022 energy standards (for both single and multi-section homes) and replace them with appropriate and cost-effective measures as determined through the statutory Manufactured Housing Consensus Committee (MHCC) consensus-based process. That process, in turn, should focus on the unique construction and affordability of HUD Code manufactured housing, rather than an attempted clone of the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), which is not appropriate for any type of manufactured housing and is inconsistent with the mandate – first set forth in the National Manufactured Housing Construction and Safety Standards Act of 1974, and later strengthened in the Manufactured Housing Improvement Act of 2000 – that manufactured housing regulation be reasonable and cost-effective for consumers in terms of the purchase price of the home.
As it already has with HUD, MHARR will continue to engage with senior leadership at DOE to seek the full withdrawal and disavowal of the May 31, 2022 “final” manufactured housing energy standards pertaining to all HUD Code manufactured homes.
MHARR will continue to keep you apprised of further developments affecting the DOE manufactured housing energy standards.
cc: Other Interested HUD Code Manufactured Housing Industry Members
Attachments
Mark Weiss
President & CEO
Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform (MHARR)
1331 Pennsylvania Ave N.W., Suite 512
Washington D.C. 20004
Phone: 202/783-4087
Fax: 202/783-4075
Email: MHARRDG@AOL.COM
Website: www.manufacturedhousingassociation.org
Part III – From a source deemed reliable with ties to MHARR plus related insights
To introduce this section of the report, several of the obstacles that are commonly identified by third-party researchers for robust manufactured housing industry potential include zoning, competitive financing, and the image/education issues. Depending on third-party source, they commonly (and depending on their presentation, not inherently incorrectly) see those factors as being somewhat beyond the manufactured housing industry’s ability to influence.
With that notion in mind, a well-placed source with links to MHARR has told MHProNews that the industry could be on the verge of a revival under Trump 2.0 (a.k.a.: T2). That source indicated that a golden age for manufactured housing could be ahead, just as Trump is presenting to the American people a consistent message that a golden age for working- and middle-class Americans, retirees, and virtually all who are not in the so-called 1 percent awaits the country.
A key obstacle, per that source, is the behavior and antics of MHI and its dominating insiders.
That source asserted that President Trump is thumping on the Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to lower rates precisely to benefit homebuyers, and by implication, others who need and benefit from access to lower cost credit. While not stated by the source, it should also be noted that if Trump is successful at getting the cost of credit down, the cost to taxpayers for funding the national debt will decline. That could leave more money for other tasks, governmental or private sector.
The main points by that source were focused on MHARR’s concerns that the Manufactured Housing Institute (MHI) may be playing games behind the scenes with the DOE on this pending energy rule.
More than one source with MHARR have privately concurred MHProNews’ concern that MHI’s consolidation-focused insiders have used the DOE energy rule to their own selfish benefit to nudge smaller firms into selling out. MHProNews has reported during the Biden-Harris (D) regime years that acquisitions by Champion (SKY) and Cavco Industries (CVCO) occurred during the past few years. Some examples and moves are linked below.
There have been others. But what may not have been fully explored by others is the impact on the land-lease manufactured home community (MHC) sector. While numbers of sources, mainstream or others, have at times mentioned or reported on the increased consolidation of MHCs, that is not always clearly tied to its related impact on residents in those communities, and then the ripple effects it has on manufactured housing in general. As the market share of new production into land lease communities, with sizable numbers operated by consolidation-focused MHCs that routinely happen to be MHI members, bad news stories in mainstream media must act as a depressing factor on public perceptions of manufactured housing. Meaning, retail sales (and thus ultimately wholesale production and shipments) are thus impacted. That pattern could fall under the umbrella of what former MHI award winner Marty Lavin, J.D., described as the “industry’s other image campaign.”
Meaning, negative news becomes a campaign of sorts. Prior to being purchased by MHI insider brand, Equity LifeStyle Properties (ELS), Datacomp/MHVillage/MHInsider linked Darren Krolewski said something differently, but apparently related. As MHProNews reported, Krolewski said that there is more bad news than good news and that it is a problem for manufactured housing. See the specifics in the second linked article below.
MHProNews has stated numerous times over the course of years that not all of those that behave in problematic ways in MHVille are linked to MHI and/or an MHI linked state association. That said, as antitrust suits filed against numerous firms that are tied to MHI, including Datacomp, ELS, Sun Communities, and others have reflected, a common feature is that those ‘bad actors’ are MHI members and/or are members of an MHI linked state association.
Part IV – Additional Information with More MHProNews Analysis and Commentary
1) For several years, MHProNews has focused on a report/analysis formula that has been summarized by these notions: facts-evidence-analysis (FEA) can generally yield an unspoken t of truth (FEAT). It is akin to a deeper application of Occam’s Razor. The more facts-evidence-analysis (FEA) that is produced in reporting yields less speculation, not more. It is the opposite of so-called conspiracy theories that are often highly speculative.
2) Not unlike left-leaning The American Prospect (TAP), Stoller has taken certain shots at Trump that may not always be supported by hard evidence. TAP and Stoller are among the sources on the left that MHProNews routinely monitors. Why? Because if the bias towards the right and/or Trump are factored out and sifted using the principle of separating the wheat from the chaff, there are times that useful and even necessary information is found.
Antitrust is one of those issues that for years have often been a talking point from the left. But what Stoller obliquely admitted in his narrative in Part I above is that the Biden-Harris (D) did not stop the steady stream of mergers, acquisitions, and monopolistic behavior. The success against Google was started under the first term of Trump, not under Biden-Harris (D) or Obama-Biden (D).
To Stoller’s credit, he is correct in saying that Trump is “flexible,” or as Dan Bongino and others have described him as “transactional.” While it may be belated, Stoller quickly knocked Biden for his economic policies before moving on to his focus on Trump. The harm caused to smaller businesses and the vast majority of consumers that caused wealth to flow from the lower and middle classes into the pockets of the top sliver of the population has been repeatedly covered by MHProNews. Stoller’s remarks on Covid and its economic impact and disruption are a reminder of prior reports. Once source bias is accounted for, regardless of if it is from the left or the right, it becomes easier to spot the facts and otherwise obscured truths that rhetoric and Orwellian “Two Minutes of Hate” style of slurs and slams generated for years against Trump or those willing to challenge the Establishment (a.k.a. the blob, the deep state, the globalists, etc.).
Tariffs have and will doubtlessly be economic shocks on markets, on trade, and on the potential for disrupting trade with China. But that is part of Trump’s point. In order to bring back manufacturing into the U.S., the cost of doing business overseas – be it China, Vietnam, or elsewhere – has to be more painful in order to onshore production and those same supply lines. Covid showed just how vulnerable the U.S. was to Chinese and other production.
Note that MHProNews and/or MHLivingNews hopes to dip in sometime soon to new information released by T2 on Covid19. It is not out of the question that Trump hopes to get not only a rebalancing and onshoring of more production to the U.S., but that he will try to get China to ‘own’ their behavior before the COVID19 pandemic was declared. That behavior also has the fingerprints of the Obama-Biden (D) administration policies and the behavior of one Dr. Anthony Fauci. But those are items that are only mentioned in passing, as they are not the focus of this report.
Stoller is right to point to the economic impacts of COVID19 on smaller businesses, and by extension, on the vast majority of the U.S. population. Stoller is correct to note that there are times that “cash is king,” but some of the specifics of his phrasing are debatable. That said, one must wonder what, for example, caused Warren Buffett led Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) to cut their holdings in Apple (heavily tied to Communist China for years) and to increase his essentially cash available reserves to at or near record highs for that firm. Like many who backed Biden-Harris (D) or Obama-Biden (D), Buffett may have anticipated the Trump victory in 2024 and expected the very type of trade/tariff and related moves that the U.S. is currently experiencing. Should Buffett move in to scoop up more stocks and/or companies, it might be a signal that the market dip is near its bottom. Buffett led Berkshire went from a buyer of Apple to a seller.
3) Stoller previously told MHProNews that concerns about monopolization of the manufactured housing market has been brought to his attention. The number of researchers, commentaries, and reports that deal with that either directly or by implication are seemingly on the rise.
4) To the specifics of the DOE energy rule matter, MHProNews has reported for years that MHI’s handling and messaging on this regulatory topic has been so inconsistent and apparently flawed – unless MHI behaviors (action/inaction) are viewed through the lens of how it benefits consolidators that are among their top members – that it seems increasingly clear that MHI’s leaders are seeking benefit for the few at great cost to the many. the principle Stoller raised, that disruption can benefit bigger firms, can be applied even though Stoller never mentioned it.
5) MHARR – buttressed by publishing from MHProNews and MHLivingNews on this topic – pushed MHI into legal action. MHI’s own attorneys said that the harm caused by the DOE energy rule would cause ‘irreparable harm’ to the industry and its producers.
But by saying as much, MHI’s own attorneys may have pointed three fingers back at themselves and their key corporate backers. Buffett’s and other leftist billionaires are among the donors to the left-leaning Sierra Club. The Sierra Club sued the DOE during T1. Industry pros have to keep the various pieces of the puzzle in mind in order to discern just how treacherous the behavior has been. See the Q&A between MHProNews and MHARR’s founding president/CEO and now senior advisor, Danny Ghorbani, on the MHARR site at this link here. Stoller and others might benefit from looking at the behavior of the nonprofits linked with consolidators to deepen their own grasp of how the steady monopolization of a market game is played.
Indeed, MHI arguably merits a case study by grad students, law students, or other researchers that are not so beholden to advertising dollars, donor dollars, or other contributions from the billionaire class and their corporate entities. Samuel Strommen at Knudson Law presented a useful and well footnotes start to such a process of peering into apparent antitrust violations in MHVille. Or the research by economists linked with the Federal Reserve, like James A. “Jim” Schmitz Jr.
MHI magically fails to mitigate the effects of burdensome regulations, even as they pat themselves on the back for being so effective. The result? Among them, consolidation. How that plays out with respect to the DOE energy rule and other regulatory “bottlenecks” is unpacked in some of the reports linked herein.
So, to be clear, while MHARR has a point that this could be a step toward resolution, it is also true that MHI can still slip the industry yet another shiv in this DOE energy rule process. That’s why reports like this one are important. They might be less likely to do so if they are being publicly spotlighted.
But one of the problems for those on the left, who are correct to point out the problems caused by monopoly power in markets, when it gets to a specific like the “energy rule,” they can often be blinded by their belief in “climate change,” which is part of what has been called the religion of the left.
‘Climatism functions as a secular religion for those who have rejected traditional religious beliefs. Like traditional religions, Climatism offers a set of moral imperatives and a vision of a better future. Adherents are called to make sacrifices in the present in order to secure… pic.twitter.com/cT8k7XGUau
— Robin Monotti (@robinmonotti) April 21, 2024
The elites and scientists have completely lost all touch with reality, playing God in the name of ‘Saving The Planet’.
But this supposed ultimate moral goal is utterly .
Climate catastrophism is a secular religion* that defies ALL climate science, even the mainstream.
*…— WeAreNarrative (@AndyWest_tweets) April 23, 2025
Several in the MHI orbit are apparently happy to platy footsy with the climate change lingo and related and have for years. Fortunately for affordable housing seekers and the smaller businesses that serve them, MHARR leaders do not seem to buy into that “climate change” narrative.
6) The very people that sincere-but mislead (mistaken, or paltering) leftists aptly call out for monopolistic practices and market manipulation to their own benefit routinely miss the multi-decade links between the Democrats and those billionaire/big corporate interests.
7) To wrap this up, not unlike the broad (but not universal) support of billionaires and corporate interests of the Kamala Harris (D) campaign and by “Wall Street,” there is evidence to support the notion that Trump will be a net benefit to smaller businesses and millions of U.S. employees.
MHProNews reported well in advance of the recent moves that decoupling with China was apparently coming.
8) God willing, thanks in part to MHARR’s steady drumbeat, the DOE energy rule will be killed off by T2 and his team at DOE and HUD. But whatever happens, MHProNews will plan to report as events and evidence warrants. Because MHI is silent publicly on these topics recently, it does raise concerns. But perhaps the spotlight will be enough to get them to do what’s right rather than do what benefits the consolidators of MHVille.
In closing, notorious MHI member Frank Rolfe’s remarks merit repeating.
There are FEA reasons why AI has said that MHProNews has more than 6x the traffic and even higher pageview levels of engagement than MHI and its allied bloggers/publishers combined.
There are reasons why AI has said that MHProNews has more than 6x the combined readership of MHI and its affiliated bloggers and trade media.
Again, our thanks to free email subscribers and all readers like you, as well as our tipsters/sources, sponsors and God for making and keeping us the runaway number one source for authentic “News through the lens of manufactured homes and factory-built housing” © where “We Provide, You Decide.” © ## (Affordable housing, manufactured homes, reports, fact-checks, analysis, and commentary. Third-party images or content are provided under fair use guidelines for media.) See Related Reports. Text/image boxes often are hot-linked to other reports that can be access by clicking on them.)
By L.A. “Tony” Kovach – for MHProNews.com.
Tony earned a journalism scholarship and earned numerous awards in history and in manufactured housing.
For example, he earned the prestigious Lottinville Award in history from the University of Oklahoma, where he studied history and business management. He’s a managing member and co-founder of LifeStyle Factory Homes, LLC, the parent company to MHProNews, and MHLivingNews.com.
This article reflects the LLC’s and/or the writer’s position and may or may not reflect the views of sponsors or supporters.
Connect on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/latonykovach
