In Face of Supercilious Disdain, Meredith Whitney Asked Why

It’s late October 2007 at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York. Trading screens flicker green and red as brokers bark into phones between sips of scalding black coffee. The market is hot — no time to let anything cool down. Meredith Whitney, a thirty-seven-year-old analyst with a coroner’s eye for balance-sheet anomalies, is finishing a report on Citigroup. Trillions in assets span more than a hundred countries, with a market value that only months earlier sat in the hundreds of billions. The numbers look invincible. And that’s usually when Whitney finds trouble.