State Budgets. Meredith Whitney on California Munis

Meredith Whitney sat down with Steve Kroft on “60 Minutes” Sunday, December 18, night to rehash her well-known views about the threat the finances of states and localities pose for the economy. “It has tentacles as wide as anythign I’ve seen. I think next to housing this is the single most important issue in the United States and certainly the largest threat to the U.S. economy,” she says.

Listen to Meredith Whitney - I don't remember her being wrong on banks

CNBC : The Bottom Line on Financials or see more Meredith Whitney Videos

Meredith Whitney (born in 1969) is a prominent banking analyst and she appears frequently on CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg News programs. Based in New York City, Whitney manages her own advisory firm, Meredith Whitney Advisory Group LLC, where she produces company-specific equity research on financial institutions and analyzes the sector's operating environment. She was formerly a managing director at Oppenheimer & Co..

Whitney Talks Small Biz

CNBC May 17, 2010
Why small businesses could see a further credit crunch, with Meredith Whitney, Meredith Whitney Advisory Group.

Meredith Whitney on banks and consumers

Meredith Whitney Goldman downgrade

This is how analyst Meredith Whitney treats the media — the industry that helped turn her into the renowned bankslayer she is today:

While clients get the full Goldman note, journalists are left to psychically read Whitney’s thoughts. Huff.

Other media outlets, we should note, are just as clueless as we are. Here’s Bloomberg for instance:

Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) — Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the biggest U.S. securities firm before converting to a bank last year, was cut to “neutral” by Meredith Whitney, as the analyst dropped her only “buy” recommendation.

Whitney, who correctly predicted in 2007 that Citigroup Inc. would cut its dividend, didn’t update her price estimate on the shares in a summary note distributed to investors today. Further details on the downgrade weren’t immediately available.

While we have no idea about Whitney’s reasoning, we can note that her last action on Goldman was an upgrade (also expurgated for the media) from `neutral’ to `buy’ right before the bank released its record second-quarter results. That upgrade, incidentally, sent GS shares — and the whole of the US equity market — rallying.

Goldman Sachs is scheduled to report third-quarter earnings on Thursday.

(from FT.com, October 13, 2009)

Meredith Whitney on Banking Problems in 2009

A bit of history:

In November of 2007, there were profanity-laced angry calls, hate-spewing e-mails, even wishes for her death. Yet financial analyst Meredith Whitney downgraded Citigroup's stock that caused $369 billion in the U.S. stock market to vanish in one day.

"It is a major call, and it takes guts," Whitney told the press. "This was the intellectually honest thing to do. I think shareholders should get out of the stock," she said. "People have always been afraid to come out with negative calls on Citi because it's a widely held company, and people are intimidated by it."

Fast forward to 2009:

On March 17, sitting in the CNBC studio, Meredith Whitney explains why she thinks that the banks may have even worse problems in 2009 than in 2008.