Meredith Whitney: She's hot and she's smart

Ok...hot for a financial analyst, but I still like her.

One person who doesn’t believe the worst of the credit crunch has passed is Oppenheimer analyst Meredith Whitney. The crisis will extend well into next year, Whitney wrote in a note Tuesday in which she predicts banks will take an additional $170 billion of writedowns by the end of next year. Whitney, who correctly predicted Citi’s (C) dividend cut last fall at a time when other analysts were generally more sanguine about the state of the industry, cut her 2008 profit outlook for Citi, JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Bank of America (BAC) and Wachovia (WB), citing the collapse of the securitization business and a sharp pullback in consumer spending. “The real harrowing days of the credit crisis are still in front of us,” she writes, “and will prove more widespread in effect than anything yet seen.”