Meredith Whitney, the star analyst whose bearish calls on financial stocks were borne out by the credit crisis, has resurfaced as an investment manager at a Bermuda insurance company.
Ms Whitney has been trying to rebuild her career after the closure of a consulting business and then a hedge fund that she set up to try to capitalise on her fame.
Her new job is to run an $800m equity investment portfolio for Arch Capital Group. Ms Whitney will not be directly picking stocks, but rather overseeing the allocation of the portfolio to external managers, which currently include BlackRock and JPMorgan.
Preston Hutchings, chief investment officer at Arch, said that the new job, while a departure from Ms Whitney's previous roles as a stock picker and analyst, would directly use her established talents.
"You like to have good athletes," he told the Financial Times, "even if they are not in the same position they have occupied in the past. They can take the full back position or they can take the wing."
Ms Whitney's hedge fund, Kenbelle Capital, launched in 2013 but failed to generate investment profits. Her backer, financier Michael Platt, sued for the return of his $50m investment; the suit was settled earlier this year.
That disappointment came on the heels of the deregistration of an eponymous brokerage and the suspension of publications by her consulting firm Meredith Whitney Associates.
More from the FT:
- Gordon Brown to join Pimco as adviser
- BT pulls pension mandate from Hermes
- Wonga hires former Lloyds director Lindsay
Ms Whitney's star rose when she was an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co, where she correctly predicted in 2007 that Citigroup would have to cut its dividend. She became a favoured business television guest and decided to branch out on her own in 2009.
In recent years, however, her highest-profile forecasts have not been so successful. She predicted a "negative feedback loop from hell" for US state and local finances, but the wave of municipal bond defaults that she originally predicted in 2010 has so far failed to occur.
Mr Hutchings said that he had known Ms Whitney since her move to Bermuda earlier this decade. The appointment was originally reported by Bloomberg.