“’More’ is not the answer here. ‘Better’ is the answer here. ‘Much less’ is the answer here.”

– Sallie Krawcheck, former CFO of Citigroup (C), discussing the need for simplicity in financial disclosures in a video interview with CNNMoney anchor Poppy Harlow. Krawcheck gets personal here: Six weeks ago she refinanced her home and encountered “mind-boggling” paperwork, she says. The financial-services industry, she notes, “had high returns on complexity for years.” Complexity bred profitability–and confusion for consumers and investors.

A champion for the individual investor since her early days as an analyst (who covered the financial-services industry), Krawcheck seems, in this video interview, tempted by the idea of a job in the Obama administration. If she went to Washington, she’d presumably take a key post in the area of regulation/investor protection. But she has three children in school in New York City, so a move would be a big deal.

Meanwhile, she’s been rumored to be a candidate to run the U.S. wealth management unit at UBS (UBS). That’s unlikely–too close to her last job at Citigroup. –Jessica Shambora

She still has her mojo.

A lot of people were surprised, even confounded, when analyst Meredith Whitney, the bear of all bears, stuck her neck out early yesterday and put forth the Street’s highest estimates for Goldman Sachs’ (GS) second-quarter profits. Whitney predicted that Goldman would report $4.65 a share. The consensus estimate was $3.48. Goldman announced this morning that it earned $4.93.

And you’d think the stock would pop on that news, wouldn’t you? Attesting to Whitney’s mojo (which, as I noted in yesterday’s Postcard, we’d been questioning), CNBC’s Jim Cramer wrote this morning that “Meredith Whitney pretty much ruined the Goldman Sachs trade” by putting that super-high estimate ahead of the earnings call. Goldman shares rose seven points yesterday to nearly $150. It’s down slightly  today. “Whitney wrecked it,” Cramer griped about the do-nothing stock.

Whitney thinks Goldman stock has plenty of room to run. Ever bearish on the economy, she’s convinced that Goldman, above all financial-services firms, will benefit from global woes, which are rising. In yesterday’s report, she says that Goldman will make out big on the surging muni market. Goldman is a major underwriter of muni debt–albeit behind Citigroup (C), Bank of America (BAC), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), and Morgan Stanley (MS)–and the No. 1 book-runner of Build America Bonds. These are a new type of municipal bond, part of the Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus plan. Cities, states, universities and government entities use BABs, as they’re known, to finance infrastructure projects. This is a potential $50 billion annual market, Whitney says, and Goldman currently holds a 25% share.

Meanwhile, state budget gaps are sure to balloon as tax revenues fall faster than expected–and  unemployment rises to 13%, Whitney predicts. Goldman is poised to benefit from the widespread pain. With her upgrade yesterday (making Goldman her only “Buy” as well as her sole upgrade since she quit Oppenheimer in February), Whitney lifted her estimate of Goldman’s full-year 2009 profits to $16.59 per share, from $10.80. In 2010, she expects Goldman to earn $19.65 a share. That’s substantially above the Wall Street consensus.

Her price target that accompanies her new “Buy” recommendation on Goldman: $186. That’s 25% above the current price. One Postcards reader, Matt in Baltimore, commented yesterday that it “would have been impressive if she had declared a ‘buy’ rating for Goldman back when it bottomed out at 52$ a share in Nov. 2008.” True. Whitney said precisely that yesterday morning on CNBC’s Squawk Box, adding that she’s only recently gained clarity on how Goldman is making money–the fixed-income bonanza. And once other analysts recognize it too, they’ll raise estimates.

So there she stands, a bull on Goldman Sachs, though still in bear clothing. Whitney’s husband, meanwhile, has been running with the bulls, literally. Six-foot-seven, 260-pound John Layfield, best known as onetime pro-wrestling champion JBL on WWE Monday Night Raw, is in Pamplona, Spain. While she was shaking up the market, he was doing the famous run. Another kind of mojo entirely.

All eyes are on Goldman Sachs (GS), which announces earnings tomorrow. What goosed the stock…and then the banking sector and then the entire market today? Meredith Whitney’s upgrade.

It mattered–and helped send Goldman up nearly 5% to $149–because the famously bearish financial-services analyst, who helped bring down Citigroup and the banking sector two years ago, has been negative ever since. She announced her upgrade of Goldman at 2:24 a.m. At least that’s when the email from her company, Meredith Whitney Advisory Group, popped into my inbox this morning. This is Whitney’s first upgrade since she broke away from Oppenheimer in February to go on her own. It’s also her only “Buy” rating among eight stocks she follows.

So yes, Meredith Whitney finally turned…on one stock only. Don’t dare call her a bull on the market. She says in today’s Goldman report that her positive outlook “is deeply rooted in our sustained bearish stance on the U.S. economy and state of U.S. financials at large.”

She likes Goldman because she’s predicting “a tsunami of debt issuance” from federal, state, and local governments to shore woefully underfunded budgets. That, plus a surge in corporate debt issuance (to at least 60% of peak cycle levels, she says) will benefit Goldman, which along with Morgan Stanley (MS) is the last Wall Street giant standing. Survival of the fittest, precisely. The weak fall and the strong get stronger.

As for Whitney, she’s showing her muscle. Last week here at Fortune, we were talking about her as we began to assess the crop of candidates for this year’s Fortune Most Powerful Women in Business list, due out in mid-September. Last year Whitney ranked No. 35 on the list. We were wondering if she’s still got her mojo. Guess she does.

P.S. Whitney has sells on three stocks: Wells Fargo (WFC), Capital One (COF), and Citigroup (C).

Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs (GS), phoned from Madrid a few weeks ago to share “The Best Advice I Ever Got.” This is the cover package in the current issue of Fortune. And you can read wisdom from Blankfein and lots of other power players –Bill Gates, Tiger Woods, Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt–in the issue and online.

Beyond Blankfein’s “Best Advice” that appears in the issue, he told me some best advice that he likes to pass on at Goldman Sachs–and I’ll share it with you here. Blankfein said that executives, on their way up, tend to forget that they become role models. “People’s sense of  themselves is a lagging indicator,” he told me. He went on to say that he talks with folks at Goldman to make sure that they recognize the impressions they leave:

I ask our people, “When you were on the way up, who had the job that you have now and how did they respond to you? It’s shocking to think that people respond to me like I responded to  [former Goldman Sachs CEO] John Weinberg. I don’t feel that way about myself.

I also say to people here, ‘Okay, take that person who was in your current position when you were growing up in the company. How often did you talk about that person to your spouse or your boyfriend or your girlfriend? A lot. Well, guess what. Those people who are subordinate to you—they’re talkin’ about you now. So whatever you did, however you behave—it may be over in your mind. But it’s not  over in theirs. They’re still talking about you, saying, ‘He or she is unpleasant or thoughtless.’

Blankfein went on to say that this sort of self-awareness has been particularly important amidst the global economic crisis and backlash against Wall Street.

I tell people here, ‘We’re going to get through this crisis. However you perform  now–well or badly–we’re going to get through it. But how you behave will affect your reputation for the rest of your career. Do you show courage or not? Do you act big or small? Are you a statesperson or are you selfish?  Everybody’s going to notice and remember.“

Think about it: Who was in your job back when you were starting out? What did you think of that person? And what impression will you leave today?

“I left a legacy of shame. It is something I will live with for the rest of my life.”

– Bernie Madoff at his sentencing in a Manhattan courtroom today. He received 150 years in prison. According to Fortune’s Nick Varchaver, who was at the sentencing, Madoff explained his crime the same way he did when he pleaded guilty in March: “”I couldn’t accept the fact that, for once in my life, I failed.”

Maybe Madoff should have read this Fortune story about bouncing back, which Pattie Sellers wrote in 1995. It’s too late, but he’ll have plenty of time to read now. –Jessica Shambora

by Jessica Shambora

The drama continues apace in banking. Yesterday we shared a CNN interview with Citigroup (C) CEO Vikram Pandit, as he struggles to hang on, while Pattie last Friday gave her take on the fall of Bank of America’s (BAC) chief risk officer, Amy Brinkley — a veteran of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list.

Another top woman in banking — one of the few still standing — swung by our office here at Fortune a few days ago. Ellen Alemany is chairman and CEO of RBS Americas (RBS) and Citizens Financial Group, an RBS unit with $6 billion in revenues and branches in 12 states. Alemany, who joined UK-based Royal Bank of Scotland in June 2007, had just finished a run of 13 town halls with thousands of her employees across the U.S.

Though you may not know her name, Alemany is very much at the center of the banking world. She’s the only woman to head a top-10 U.S. commercial bank. And as the representative for the Boston district (and only woman) on the Federal Advisory Council, she regularly consults with Fed chair Ben Bernanke and the Board of Governors.

So what is Alemany’s outlook? “There will be more small bank failures in the next six to nine months,” she told us, noting that she’s concerned about declining real-estate values and rising unemployment. She sees the negative trends in her own backyard. Citizens’ headquarters are in Rhode Island, where the jobless rate is 11.1%. And the bank operates in Michigan, where the unemployment rate, 12.9%, is the highest in the U.S.

Recovery seems so far away that businesses aren’t even looking to expand. “We have money to lend, but the loan demand isn’t there,” Alemany says. “It’s going to be difficult for the remainder of this year through the first half of next year.”

As for her own career, Alemany has come to understand “difficult.” After 21 years at Citigroup, where she ran Global Transaction Services, a profitable $8 billion unit in some 100 countries, she moved to RBS. It might appear that she was seeing safer ground. But the British government has had to shore RBS and now owns 70% of the business. And if you think that Citi is the worst-performing bank stock, think again. RBS’s shares have sputtered 87% in the past 12 months. Citi is down a mere 83%.

“The world’s looking for a new business model.”

– Citigroup (C) CEO Vikram Pandit, defending his leadership, in an interview with CNN Tuesday. During the past week, news media outlets have reported that FDIC Chair Sheila Bair thinks Pandit lacks the retail banking experience to revive Citi and wants him out. Meanwhile, others speculate that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner believes that Pandit deserves a shot at the turnaround and that a management change could do more harm than good.

Both Geithner and Bair play key roles in the approval of a $58 billion conversion of preferred shares into common stock, intended to shore up Citigroup’s capital. Announced in February and scheduled to occur in April, the conversion was held up by negotiations with federal officials. But it should happen this week, according to Citi. With that, the government will own as much as 34% of the bank. That’s a dicey investment. The stock, trading at $3.41, is down 83% in the last 12 months.

So what sort of new business model does Pandit forsee? “When you look at the last five, 10 years, there were two engines of growth. There was the U.S. consumer and credit creation. None of those are likely to be the engines of growth going forward…I’m optimistic that we might start seeing stability in the financial markets, but that’s stage one. Stage two is about what kind of world we want to have going forward, what’s the new business model? And that’s what we’re really focused on at Citi.”

And the question for you: Should Citi shareholders, including the government, give Pandit more time to deliver? –Jessica Shambora

The ouster of Bank of America’s (BAC) chief risk officer, Amy Brinkley, was inevitable, as I wrote in “Behind the shakeup at BofA” on Friday.

And as I mentioned in that piece, two years ago, Fortune featured Brinkley and five other execs in “One Step Away,” about rising-star Most Powerful Women on track to be CEOs of Fortune 500 companies someday. So what’s happened to the other five?

One woman made it to the top: Ellen Kullman became CEO of DuPont in January.

Avon (AVP) President Liz Smith is on track to succeed Andrea Jung as CEO there.

Schering-Plough pharma boss Carrie Cox will soon be working for Merck (MRK), pending its  $41 billion acquisition likely to close in the fourth quarter.

And the other two women in “One Step Away”? They’re off the career ladder, like Brinkley. Morgan Stanley (MS) co-president Zoe Cruz has been on the sidelines since John Mack booted her in late 2007. As at BofA, her dismissal was a case of a CEO taking out a top deputy over serious risk-management problems.

Meanwhile, Susan Arnold’s opt out was voluntary. When the Procter & Gamble (PG) President quit her post last March, one day after her 55th birthday, she did it to take back her life. As for returning to a big corporate job, who knows? She’s not deciding yet, she told me. Meanwhile, she’s staying in the game by serving on the boards of Walt Disney and McDonald’s.

Here’s the reality: In this stressful environment, more and more top business women are questioning the worth of their careers. Last month came a retirement announcement from one of Wal-Mart’s (WMT) most senior women, Linda Dillman, at the top of her game. Dillman, EVP of Benefits and Risk Management at Wal-Mart, never lusted for big titles. I bet she’ll return to her roots: information technology.

Another veteran of Fortune’s Power 50 list, Sue Hellmann, recently quit her job as president of product develepment at Genentech to become Chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco.

More and more women are making big life choices. Because real power is being able to choose. That’s a point that Claire Shipman and Katty Kay write about extensively in their new book, Womenomics.

By the way, I hear that Amy Brinkley is doing okay. She certainly isn’t proud of failing to keep BofA well-capitalized and sturdy. But she’s part of a sweeping reorg there, and more change will come as CEO Ken Lewis fights to keep control. It may be small comfort, but there’s less shame in losing your job now than there has been in our lifetimes.

by Patricia Sellers

The news that another Fortune Most Powerful Woman — Bank of America (BAC) chief risk officer Amy Brinkley — has fallen was inevitable.

The surprise is that she lasted as long as she did.

The pressure is that intense inside CEO Ken Lewis’ financial-services empire — now the largest U.S. bank by revenues and No. 11 on the Fortune 500, thanks to a run of aggressive acquisitions. The topper, Merrill Lynch, was a rescue that Lewis agreed to during that fateful September 2008 weekend when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the global financial crisis spun out of control. This marked the beginning of the end of Brinkley’s career as BofA’s savvy risk manager and close CEO adviser.

Brinkley, 53, seemed ever-adaptable for three decades. She started at BofA in 1978 as a management trainee in the Commercial Credit department and rose through a variety of jobs, including marketing and consumer products, before taking the top risk post in 2002. As BofA profits compounded and its stock rose as high as $55, Brinkley’s star rose too. She was No. 22 on last year’s Fortune Most Powerful Women list. In the 2007 Most Powerful Women issue, we included her in a feature called “One Step Away,” about six women who could be Fortune 500 CEOs someday.

“Always be open to a broad range of possibilities” when creating a career, she told me.

But as BofA’s troubles grew and the Merrill acquisition came to be viewed as insanely high-priced (even at $29 billion, the ultimate price in the all-stock transaction), somebody had to pay. The official word from BofA is that Brinkley is retiring by mutual agreement. But clearly, she had no choice but to step down. (She declined to comment for this story.) To replace her, Ken Lewis has installed Greg Curl, 60, a 31-year BofA veteran whose most recent job was Global Corporate Strategic Development and Planning executive.

More heads will likely roll. BofA’s stock is now trading around $12. And regulators, who recently required the bank to raise $33.9 billion in new equity, are continuing to pressure Lewis to strengthen the company’s management and board. Directors have been resigning. The latest: former Lowe’s (LOW) CEO Bob Tillman.

Meanwhile, Lewis, 62, has been called to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform next Thursday. He’ll be grilled about his knowledge of Merrill’s deteriorating condition at the time he agreed to the buyout.

Amidst all this drama, one other Fortune Most Powerful Woman stands firmly at BofA: Barbara Desoer, president of Bank of America Home Loans & Insurance. She’s been in charge of integrating another buzzed-about acquisition: Countrywide Financial. Certainly, Countrywide has left another black mark on the bank: The SEC yesterday announced that it has filed civil fraud charges against former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo. Even so, this deal looks like a good one: It’s given BofA ownership of 20% of the U.S. mortgage market, at a reasonable acquisition price of $2.5 billion.

Desoer, who started at BofA in 1977 and has headed technology and operations as well as marketing, is nose-to-the-grindstone and low-profile except for an on-stage Q&A last fall with my colleague Geoff Colvin. Ranked No. 27 on the Most Powerful Women list, she’s earned high marks inside the bank and from analysts for integrating Countrywide smoothly, amidst so many distractions.

Maybe it helps that Dosoer is located a world away, in a Los Angeles suburb. Usually it hurts to be far from the center and the CEO. This time, distance might well be an advantage.

Goldman Sachs’ (GS) top women execs hosted a breakfast this morning for the 32 mentees who are participating in this year’s Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. Dina Powell, Goldman’s managing director who heads corporate outreach, was front and center — appropriately since this mentoring program was her idea. Back in 2005, when she was an assistant Secretary of State working for Condoleezza Rice, she and I hatched the mentoring partnership in her office.

Five years later, participants of Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women Summit — including CEOs Andrea Jung of Avon (AVP), Anne Mulcahy of Xerox (XRX), Pat Woertz of ADM, Ann Moore of Time Inc. (TWX), and the top women at Fortune 500 companies such as ExxonMobil (XOM) and American Express (AXP) — have mentored the best and brightest young women leaders across the developing world.

And now that she’s at Goldman, Dina Powell is a mentor in the program too. Last year she and Goldman exec Edie Hunt hosted a bold and brilliant financial-services entrepreneur, Maali Qasem, from Jordan. This year, Powell is mentoring Femi Olayebi, a Nigerian entrepreneur who is also a graduate of Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women program (which Powell oversees). Powell and Hunt (sounds like a law firm, doesn’t it?) were joined at this morning’s breakfast by other top women at the firm — including three who shared the best advice they’ve ever received from a mentor:

Stacey Bash-Polley, co-head of fixed-income sales at Goldman: “Follow the 24-hour rule.” If passion or anger rises over an email, she said, hold off replying until the next day. Be thoughtful. You’ll be thankful the next day.

Kathy Elsesser, head of the consumer retail group in investment banking: “Form a personal board of directors.” On her board: friends, colleagues, clients and competitors. “I force myself to use my board for advice,” she says. “So I have to slow down, be more thoughtful and make better decisions.”

Lisa Shalett, COO, Global Compliance: “Stop pulling the plant from its roots.” If you regularly pull a plant to look at its roots — to check how it’s growing, to ask ‘Am I doing this right?’ — the plant is going to die. Shalett catches herself getting in her own way, she says. “You have to free yourself to let plants grow.”

All good advice. What’s your good advice for managing your life and career?