Meredith Whitney

Meredith Whitney worked as a bank analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. when, in October 2007, she published a research report warning that Citigroup faced capital inadequacy and would need to cut its dividend significantly. This report — published before the 2008 financial crisis had fully erupted — caused Citi's stock to fall approximately 7% in a single day, a remarkable impact for a single analyst's note. Her analysis proved correct: Citi did cut its dividend and subsequently required a massive government bailout. Whitney became one of the most prominent financial analysts of the crisis period, appearing frequently on television and being labelled by Fortune magazine as 'The Woman Who Called Wall Street's Collapse.' She founded the Meredith Whitney Advisory Group in 2009. In 2010 she made another high-profile call: a '60 Minutes' interview in which she predicted hundreds of municipal bond defaults worth hundreds of billions of dollars within 12 months. This call proved dramatically wrong — municipal defaults remained at historically low levels — tarnishing her reputation. She subsequently closed her advisory firm. Her career illustrates both the extraordinary rewards that come from a single correct contrarian call and the risks of building a reputation on predictions rather than on a sustained analytical track record.