Meredith Whitney Is Not Well
We suggested last week that Oppenheimer analyst and erstwhile Citi hater Meredith Whitney had grown tired of Panditville. Her last report, in which she concluded, "We wish [Citi's] management team all the best in their ambitious endeavors, but we fear [it] is past the point of fixing," seemed to imply that her interest in relentlessly defecating all over the C was waning, and that she'd be scaling back her life's work, perhaps to devote more time and energy to hawking her husband's liquid Viagra. But we never thought for a second we were on to something. Then lo and behold:
The analyst [Meredith Whitney] lowered her 2008 outlook for JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wachovia. She, however, cut her second-quarter earnings view for Bank of America and JPMorgan while raising it by a cent each for Citigroup and Wachovia.
We're just going to assume that this is Part One of a two part rope-a-dope scheme in which Whitney gets Citi's hopes up and then body slams them in a way only a woman who's husband is a former pro-wrestler and is now trying to sell a berry-flavored "sexual endurance drink" called Mamajuana knows how.
Oppenheimer's Whitney Sees Credit Crisis Well into '09 [CNBC]