After his own experience dealing with a mortgage mess, Nye Lavalle set out to learn all he could about the mortgage industry, traveling nationwide to dig into records. In 2003, he compiled a dossier of practices at Fannie Mae. In hindsight, the problems he found look like a blueprint of today's foreclosure crisis.
Occupy Wall Street and its coast-to-coast spinoffs captured the headlines in 2011, but the economic debate it helped trigger should reverberate deep into 2012. That's the debate over the future of the American middle class.