Market Failure

The market has only a few jobs:

Be fair.

Be fully disclosative.

Be low on friction (like trading costs, commissions, etc.)

If a market does all of the above, it wins. If it doesn't, it fails.

So...what's a failure in modern era? Well, the mortgage crisis of 2008/9 was one failure. That mortgage/housing market wasn't fairly disclosative of risk, and a ton of people were given loans who shouldn't have gotten them. They were then evicted and misery followed. So whose fault was that market failure? Should the banks have "known better" and not loaned 500 grand to a gardener married to a substitute school teacher with three kids and no savings, even if they technically qualified? (And yes, the definition of "qualified" clearly had to change.)

Had the bank denied that enormous loan to people who couldn't afford it, wouldn't there then be an outcry from journalists wanting to get clicks to the blog about how unfair evil corporate America is, in not letting the little guy buy into the American Dream? There'd then be a picture of the bank CEO's corporate jet, and politicians would milk the story for votes.

So...yeah, markets fail in different ways. One thing we know for certain: whatever the market rules are today, they'll be different next year.