Meredith Whitney - Recognition

Recognition

In 2007, Forbes.com's "The Best Analysts: Stock Pickers" listed Whitney as the second best stock picker in the capital-market industry and the New York Post named her one of the fifty most powerful women in New York city.

Whitney's extremely bearish view on banks landed her on the cover of the August 18, 2008, issue of Fortune Magazine. Even before the problems that befell Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers in September, she said, "It feels like I'm at the epicenter of the biggest financial crisis in history, however even a broken clock is right twice a day". In October 2008, Whitney was ranked as one of Fortune 500’s “50 Most Powerful Women in Business.” In 2008, she won CNBC's "Power Player of the Year" over Jamie Dimon, Ben Bernanke, and Hank Paulson.

On December 19, 2010, in an interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes, Whitney stated that between fifty and a hundred counties, cities, and towns in the United States would have "significant" municipal bond defaults, totaling "hundreds of billions" of dollars in losses, and that this would be "something to worry about within the next 12 months". Since the record amount of money lost in one year through municipal bond defaults is $8.2 billion, Ms. Whitney's comments about hundreds of billions in losses drew a great deal of attention, much of it critical. As of February 2012, "her prediction had yet to materialize."

According to Vanity Fair writer Michael Lewis, in his November 2011 article, California and Bust, "But that’s not at all what she had said: her words were being misrepresented so that her message might be more easily attacked. “She was referring to the complacency of the ratings agencies and investment advisers who say there is nothing to worry about,” said a person at 60 Minutes who reviewed the transcripts of the interview for me, to make sure I had heard what I thought I had heard. “She says there is something to worry about, and it will be apparent to everyone in the next 12 months.”