Meredith Whitney – money honey to dollar dominatrix
The woman who predicted the financial crisis in October last year wins Charles Laurence's Prophet of Doom of the Year award
Barack Obama has been voted Time magazine's Person of the Year β surprise, surprise. The animal protection brigade at PETA have chosen Oprah Winfrey as their Person of the Year. Now it's time to reveal the big one, The First Post's Prophet of Doom of the Year.
Step forward Meredith Whitney. If the Masters of the Universe had only listened to Meredith, we might have been able to banish the unwelcome spirit of Scrooge this Christmas.
The 38-year-old analyst at a rather obscure Wall Street bank - Oppenheimer & Co - has the distinction of being the only person in the free market world to have raised the alarm of the impending crash which is now beggaring banks, brokers, car workers and the rest of us.
Whitney has become so famous she has been signed up by a talent agency
On October 31, 2007, she came out with a report on the true state of Citigroup Inc, America's biggest bank, a report which has since become legend. She wrote-down its worthiness for investment on the grounds that its dividend exceeded its profits and that it was repaying its investors faster than it was taking in new money β in other words, it was spiraling into the classic death of the great Ponzi scheme which we now know all of Wall Street to have been.
"That call was absolutely straightforward," she now says. "The easiest call I've ever made."
Since then Whitney, who is blonde, well-formed and looks younger than her years, has become so famous that she has been signed up by the Greater Talent Network Agency and is reaping, like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, a windfall fortune in speaking fees.
She is rarely absent from the daily news broadcasts, and her word can still wipe out millions of dollars in share values. Forbes
magazine places her No 2 on its list of 'Best Analysts: Stock Pickers', the New York Post has her as one of the 50 most powerful women in New York, and Fortune 500 lists her among the '50 most powerful women in business.' Last August, she made the glossy front cover of Fortune, dolled-up as if for a fashion magazine. "An analyst in this day and age," she pronounces, "must go balls to the wall in order to be heard."
Rich people regard Whitney in much the same light as a mobster sees a βratβ
The truth is that Wall Streeters making out like bandits simply did not want to hear her. In October last year, when there may still have been time to rescue the capital markets, she was ostracised by her peers, and subjected to doubts and ridicule in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
The problem is that a great many rich people regard Whitney in much the same light as a mobster sees a 'rat', holding her to blame for the meltdown. Things got so bad that her husband cancelled out-of-town trips to escort her to and from her office. And her husband, oddly, is the professional wrestler John Layfield, a former champion of World Wrestling Entertainment. It is a marriage which adds to Whitney's reputation for "having really big brass ones".
The 
Filed under: Meredith Whitney, John Layfield, Americans, Finance, Credit crunch
About the author
Charles Laurence has reported from every corner of the USA and the New World. He currently lives with his teenage son... MORE
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Meredith Whitney, "Prophet Of Doom"? Please. Anyone with GCSE in Mathematics could foresee the financial fraud in the UK and USA. Oh, correction, we are meant to say "Crisis", that's it. Apologies for the slip up there. What we couldn't prophetise, of course, was that our governments would be taking OUR MONEY and giving it to Private Corps. ... to lend back to us at interest! Evil, but genius! How about building new schools and hospitals and creating thousands of jobs in the process? Actually, what is required is a revolution, but it seems everyone is too busy sleeping off Xmas. Wakey, wakey!
Posted by Jules at 11:28am on December 30, 2008
errr? "has the distinction of being the only person in the free market world to have raised the alarm of the impending crash which is now beggaring banks, brokers, car workers and the rest of us." Take your pick, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers, Marc faber and Robert Shiller all predicted the downturn and US economic problems way before she did and their analysis seems to have been their own. Each has approached the problem from his own angle/industry and come to the same conclusion. Whitney, seems to have seen seen the cracks and called it when it was too late to do anything about it. Even now, she doesn't point to the underlying problems in the US economy or suggest what could resolve the problems other than return it to the state it was 2 years ago. i.e highly leveraged, in a bubble and about to crash.
Posted by Sumesh at 11:48am on December 30, 2008
Peter Warburton's book "Debt and Delusion" came out in 1998. It describes the bond and dervatives market collapse in detail.
Posted by Paul Hirsh at 10:13am on January 13, 2009
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