As the housing market struggles to keep pace with economic recovery elsewhere, homeowners would love to have a crystal ball.  Absent that, however, they have AEI resident fellow Edward Pinto, one of seven panelists to be awarded with Zillow and Pulsenomics' Crystal Ball Award.

Ever since its founding in 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has maintained an aggressive and bellicose international security posture. Today, fully two decades after the end of the Cold War, North Korea's external defense and security policies look arguably more extreme and anomalous than ever.

The number of schools ranked highly in guides such as Barron's Profiles of American Colleges is increasing, without any evidence that these schools' instructional quality is also increasing. Applicants and their families should be wary of letting these rankings serve as the main criteria in their college decisions.

The Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee believes that the SEC should give serious consideration to creating a competitive market for the data on trades and quotes produced by the various securities exchanges.

On Feb. 15, Leslie Moonves, the brilliant CEO of CBS, gave a piece of good news to investors — there would be an addition to the bottom line in 2012 of about $190 million, thanks to huge spending on political commercials coming into the network and its owned and operated...

Efforts to blame the banks for the financial crisis are failing because they are not supported by data. The key fact is that, by 2008, before the crisis, half of the 54 million mortgages in the U.S. financial system were subprime and other low-quality mortgages.

We have to face a key reality: Well-intentioned but disastrous mistakes are made by very intelligent, well-educated, highly informed people, backed by vast computing power and reams of data, but wrong nonetheless.

Political dysfunction. Partisanship at record levels. Attack politics run amok. And public approval of Congress scraping the single digits (Sen. John McCain is fond of saying it's down to blood rlatives and paid staff).