"If you look at the drivers for unemployment I don't see that reversing very soon," Whitney said.
If consumers were to decide to spend, "that would be a game-changer," but it would be an unnatural thing to do in a recession, she said.
"A lot of themes are constant, which is the US consumer and the small business doesn't have any credit, credit is still contracting," Whitney said.
Consumer debt and consumer credit have dropped according to the latest figures which also show that people have been spending more from their debit cards than from their credit cards.
"Obviously that doesn't bode well for spending," Whitney said.
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She said another leg down was coming for stocks but that Goldman Sachs still has "gas in the tank" and she kept her 'buy' on its stock.
"Goldman is taking a lot of the place that Lehman left," she said.
But banks are not going to see their earnings rise too much from now on, she warned.
"Banks are taking advantage of what the government is doing by artificially inflating asset prices so they can ride a steep yield curve and they're going to have a third quarter that reflects that," Whitney said.
Their shares are unlikely to be uplifted by these results as it happened in mid-July, because then they were under-valued, she added.
