Michael Lewis Wrestles Meredith Whitney’s Legacy
Not since Mary Meeker was crowned "Queen of the Net", circa 1999, has the Street has to deal with such a influential female on the SellSide.
Meredith Whitney is living large, and apparently not even death threats can slow her down. She has everything, save a nickname.
Michael Lewis cannot help her with a moniker, but has plenty of other observations:
One of the rare inspirational subplots of our current financial panic has been the rise of Meredith Whitney. An obscure and little-noticed analyst of Wall Street banks, working for an obscure and little-noticed Wall Street bank (Oppenheimer & Co.), Whitney has become, in a matter of months, a woman who moves markets.
It all started back on Oct. 31, 2007, when she published her now-legendary report on Citigroup Inc. In it, she pointed out that the company's dividend now exceeded its profits -- the bank was handing money back to its investors faster than it was taking it in from its customers.....Whitney now says ``that call was absolutely straightforward, the easiest call I've ever made.'' But at the time, none of her fellow analysts was saying anything like it. Bloomberg
The meltdown on Wall Street put Whitney on the map, and she has taken advantage of the marketing opportunity afforded.
Indeed, both her and Dick Bove have been in the BuySide’s face nearly every week since the drama began to unfold in earnest. But they have been quite promotional, a quality the BuySide frequently rejects when it comes to CEO’s of publicly traded entities.
Nonetheless, she will hold onto the bully pulpit until she is dislodged by the next “It” girl. And you have to wonder, is she lucky, or good?
She has paid her dues, first coming to my attention from a First Union salesman around the year 2000, a fact that was not appreciated back in November. And although she still works for a 2nd tier firm, she now inspires both respect and fear from the wounded bulge brackets.
She has imported into Wall Street a new, skeptical predisposition toward its own companies. On Oct. 31, 2007, everyone else was still more or less thinking of these firms as they had since at least the early 1980s, when they became masters of the universe. Since then the markets haven’t seriously questioned whether the firms at the heart of capitalism actually knew what they were doing with capital.
Meredith Whitney realized, a moment before everyone else, that in the relationship between Wall Street firms and the investors who bankroll them something fundamental had changed.
Nice work, Meredith, but Wall Street is waving the white flag. Could you go on vacation....pretty please?
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The Rise and Rise of Analyst Meredith Whitney: Michael Lewis
Bloomberg
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