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confess some part of me thought, If only I’d stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created. The characters at the center of Citigroup’s mess were the very same people I’d worked with at Salomon Brothers; a few of them had been in my Salomon Brothers training class. At some point I couldn’t contain myself: I called Meredith Whit

called Whitney again to ask her, as I was asking others, if she knew anyone who had anticipated the subprime mortgage cataclysm, thus setting himself up in advance to make a fortune from it. Who else had noticed, before the casino caught on, that the roulette wheel had become predictable? Who else inside the black box of modern finance had grasped

From that moment, Meredith Whitney became E. F. Hutton: When she spoke, people listened. Her message was clear: If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a cold, hard look at these crappy assets they’re holding with borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale. The vast assemblages of highly paid people

While the firm did employ a well-regarded chief risk officer, Madelyn Antoncic, who had a PhD in economics and had worked at Goldman Sachs, her input was virtually nil. She was often asked to leave the room when issues concerning risk came up at executive committee meetings, and in late 2007, she was removed from the committee altogether.

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