Facebook Inc. took a momentous action last week. And I don’t mean its announced intention to sell shares for $28 to $35 in an initial public offering later this month.

The European financial crisis and the ineffective effort to stop Iran’s nuclear-weapons program are crashing into each other. As the European Union adopts new restrictions on importing Iranian oil, the most-troubled EU economies will continue to seek delays and exceptions.

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, the most common way U.S. buyers finance a home purchase, isn’t the ideal instrument its supporters claim it to be.

A major factor behind the weak recovery and gloomy outlook is a climate of policy-induced economic uncertainty. An index we devised shows U.S. policy uncertainty at historically high levels.

As has been generally understood and underscored by Standard & Poor's downgrade of the U.S.'s AAA credit rating, elected officials were willing to push the federal government to the brink of default. This was startling proof of deep dysfunction in the political process.

Recent research points to a shift in recruiting behavior by employers as an important factor in the distressing U.S. jobs situation. Employers have influenced the pace of job filling by the intensity of their recruiting efforts.

The absence of clear U.S. leadership on Libya has produced the current impasse, both diplomatically and militarily. Although NATO should ultimately prevail, it is wrenching that our president has caused so many of the problems we now confront.

No one wants to excuse the managers and regulators of financial companies from responsibility for the financial crisis. But it is too easy to assign blame and walk away, without doing the serious work of finding out what really happened.