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One star of the credit crunch has been Meredith Whitney, a sharp-dressing, whip-tongued blonde who made what Wall Street refers to simply as "the call". It was October 2007, and she said Citigroup was in deeper trouble than it was admitting. Two days later Chuck Prince, the chief executive, resigned and Citi's stock has since fallen over 90%.
Whitney was then an anonymous analyst at Oppenheimer. She has since become a financial superstar and set up the Meredith Whitney Advisory Group to exploit her new-found status. She resembles a younger version of celebrity homemaker Martha Stewart, and cuts a dazzling figure among the suits on financial television.
But her status as Wall Street's go-to analyst has stirred resentment. The Wall Street Journal just ran a column arguing that Whitney's "myth might be in line for a downgrade". The author, David Weidner, argued that Whitney's Citigroup call was not so brilliant or groundbreaking.
His larger point was that the media tends to latch on to bearish analysts in bad times with the same fervour with which they fête bulls when markets rise. Whitney has become the Doom Diva, predicting falling house prices, more bank troubles and more wrist-slitting gloom.
But what happens when things turn around? It will be interesting to see if the Whitney brand can survive good times, as well as bad.
* The "pik toggle" may sound like a piece of climbing gear, but these payment-in-kind notes, which allow borrowers to defer cash interest payments if an investment runs into trouble, have very down-to-earth uses. Over the past three years, some 60 private equity-owned businesses in the US sold $38 billion in pik-toggle notes, and about a third have deployed them. Neiman Marcus, the store chain owned by Texas Pacific Group and Warburg Pincus, did so this week. Many more will follow.
* Steve Rattner, a famed New York banker recruited to work for the Obama Treasury, may struggle with life away from Fifth Avenue. A profile, meant to point up his proximity to power, read: "He occupies a spacious office in the basement of the Treasury. Out one window, through the thick security bars, he can see Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's car, and a portion of the White House." Hardly The West Wing.
