It's better to think that markets are about competition between centrally planned economies. We call those centrally planned economies companies. A successful c

It's better to think that markets are about competition between centrally planned economies. We call those centrally planned economies companies. A successful company is one that managed to beat the market. History gives us evidence that a company can beat the market for decades, but not forever. Markets allocate resources efficiently. In the long term, in large enough scale, on the average, and with a high probability. But the scale is often not that large. In many fields, a small number of companies dominate the market, making it susceptible to groupthink. When business leaders are biased in the same way, the market is also biased. Once in a while, we get a bubble that way. Because value is ultimately subjective, the efficiency of the market depends on how you weigh individual value judgments. If each dollar gets one vote, efficient resource allocation looks different than when each person gets one vote. Markets tend to favor the former. Regulators like to think that they moving the needle towards the latter. Sometimes they manage to do that, and sometimes they move it in a completely different direction.