Fortune Magazine -- It's the first time I've seen Wall Street's toughest analyst look rattled. Though she and I are there to see her husband, pro wrestling star John Layfield "JBL" , the evening's most compelling match turns out to be not Layfield's but a brutal-looking showdown between rivals Chris Jericho and Shawn Michaels. Midway through the bout, Michaels appears to suffer a bloody cut near his eye and begins stumbling around the ring as if he's just been lobotomized.

I'm more bemused than worried - every match thus far has ended with the vanquished looking broken and semiconscious. Whitney, however, is shielding her eyes. Maybe it's because her husband once sustained a cracked vertebrae during a match, but she's absolutely convinced that this time around, the semichoreographed mayhem in the WWE ring has taken a sickeningly painful turn.

Good thing for investors that Whitney takes a more skeptical approach to banks than to pro wrestling. In less than a year she has transformed herself from a Wall Street backbencher - someone once known less for her research than for her marriage to Layfield and her stint as a stock commentator on Fox News - into the most influential stock analyst in America. And certainly the most bearish. Whitney's rise to prominence began last October when she dropped jaws from New York to London with her audacious yet spot on prediction that Citigroup C , Fortune would be forced to cut its dividend to prop up its leaky balance sheet.

She followed that call with forecasts of more losses and write-downs at the likes of Bank of America BAC , Fortune , Lehman Brothers LEH , Fortune , and UBS, as well as some insightful tangents on how the implosion of the bond insurers would threaten banks' bottom lines.

Sometimes she seems steps ahead of management. On a Merrill Lynch conference call in mid-July, she asked CEO John Thain why the company wasn't unloading damaged assets and boosting capital.

Thain demurred, but less than two weeks later, Merrill MER , Fortune did just that. Whereas her peers keep searching for some sort of light at the end of the tunnel, Whitney thinks the tunnel is about to collapse.

Meredith Whitney: Degrees on RealMoney - TheStreet

Bank stock investors will get crushed if they jump back in now, she contends, because the banks are facing much, much bigger credit losses than what they've reported so far. This isn't ego talking. An executive with a top hedge fund goes so far as to compare Whitney's influence to that of former Goldman Sachs chief strategist Abby Joseph Cohen in the late s.

Whitney's insights haven't always translated into lucrative investment picks. Based on the performance of her buy and sell recommendations relative to her industry peer group - what analyst tracker Starmine refers to as an analyst's "industry excess return" - Whitney's stock picking ranked 1,th out of 1, equity analysts last year and th out of 1, through the first half of That said, evaluating Whitney solely on the timing of her buys and sells misses the point.

It's not just that she's bearish on the entire banking industry. What makes Whitney so interesting is the brutality of her arguments and the evidence she summons in making them. Whitney warned last year - and continues to warn today - that the "incestuous" relationship between the banks and the credit-rating agencies during the real estate bubble will have a long-lasting impact on banks' ability to recover. This is a problem, because every time their portfolios are hit by significant credit downgrades, banks are forced to improve their capital ratios.

Often that means issuing reams of new stock, which leads to serious dilution, something shareholders at Citi, Merrill Lynch, and Washington Mutual WM , Fortune can unhappily attest to.

Obviously the financial companies she covers aren't thrilled with all the dire talk. Whitney got an earful from Wachovia WB , Fortune , she says, when she downgraded the stock to "underperform" in July. Investors aren't always thrilled either.

She says she's received one death threat and hundreds of abusive e-mails and phone calls. But at least now there's a grudging respect for her work.

By Jon Birger , senior writer. Bank slayer and the ring king.

Meredith Whitney - Wikipedia

Whitney, in Central Park, where she often runs, made her name with accurate predictions of losses and write-downs. Whitney met her husband, pro wrestling star John Layfield, when they were both talking stocks on Fox News. Whitney, in a luxury box, watches the wrestling action at the WWE's Great American Bash at the Nassau Coliseum in July. The woman who called Wall Street's meltdown. Apple scores high in PC World's relability survey Dean Kamen still wants to save the world Twitter nabs top app maker.