The Essayist

The pathos of the 2008 Great Recession had a fairly wide sweep, from minimum wage busboys, to newspaper heiresses like Veronica Hearst, to Fed Reserve chair Ben Bernanke, whose childhood home was lost as a result of a relative not making timely mortgage payments --- wherein all the latter experienced some type of economic pain, or at least embarrassment, related to the Great Recession. These episodes are captured in this book as a way to bring a slight degree of levity to this economic catastrophe, but to also underscore a serious juncture in American social and political theory as well. Author D. Sidney Potter, once a prolific real estate investor in the early to late part of the real estate boom that lead to the bust, puts a spotlight on the real estate finance mortgage industry as once a lucrative insider, to now as a disenfranchised member and erstwhile benefactor. The irony of having to make his living as a mortgage operations professional that now examines the very mortgage financings that once bore his name, does not go past him. His unabrasive and sometimes crude essays examine the usual suspects; from bankster CEOs, nascent political movements, professional legislators, to the analytics of mortgage products that resulted in the self-inflicted implosion. Mr. Potter's collection of essays act as a self-entombed time capsule that should be taken as a testimony of fact, not fiction.