“’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).

The ideal career path may be: reaching the top of the corporate world, then taking time off for family when your kids need you most, and then jumping back into a primo job at a top-tier global company.

Impossible in this dreadful economy? Here’s someone who’s done it. Remember Jeanne Jackson? At Gap (GPS) in the 90s, she built Banana Republic and then went to help Wal-Mart (WMT) take Walmart.com from start-up stage. But after leaving Wal-Mart seven years ago, Jackson was out of the big game, except for board gigs at McDonald’s (MCD), Nordstrom (JWN), and Nike (NKE).

She’s back. Actually, I follow these Most Powerful Women (and Jackson was one, on our annual list a decade ago), but the announcement four months ago that she landed at Nike–as President, Direct to Consumer, reporting to the CEO–was so low-key that I’d missed it. A few days ago, I spotted Jackson’s name and Nike title on the participant list for our upcoming Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. I popped her an email. We talked yesterday.

“I made a commitment to my family,” Jackson, 57, told me, explaining why she had dropped out for so long. Since 2001, when she joined the Nike board, Jackson actually had talked on and off with chairman Phil Knight and CEO Mark Parker about joining the company. But not until this year, when her son graduated from high school and her daughter accepted an internship in London, at Burberry, did she decide to jump.

She didn’t think the jump would be to Nike first thing. “I thought I’d do something related to private equity,” says Jackson, who has been quietly running her own private equity/consulting business, MSP Capital, out of Newport Beach, California for the past several years. She expected one of the companies she backed “would speak to me.” But nothing did. (Along with “some spectacular failures,” she says, she scored a couple of hits, including Pure Digital, which sells the Flip camera and recently was acquired by Cisco.)

As the global economy tanked, she felt ever more drawn to the thing that she has focused on throughout her career: strong brands. Says Jackson, who was at Disney (DIS) and Victoria’s Secret early on: “In this economy, consumers default to strong brands.” Now, in this new role that Nike CEO Parker created for her, she oversees the company’s global retail holdings. That includes some 3,500 franchised Nike stores, more than 600 wholly-owned Nike and Cole Haan stores, and five e-commerce sites. Some $3 billion in revenues annually travels through these “direct to consumer” channels.

And despite the global meltdown, Nike is performing well. Revenues reached $19.2 billion in the year ended May 31. Profits fell 21% after five years of 20%+ annual growth, but investors have stayed with the stock: It’s up nearly 40% in five years, while the S&P has dropped 20%. The world’s largest athletic shoe and apparel marketer, Nike has smartly reduced spending and layers of management, while selectively adding key talent like Jackson.

Of course, she’s contending with the retail slowdown–Nike too has cut new-store expansion. But in some ways, Jackson is returning to the sort of thing she did inside Gap and Wal-Mart: playing entrepreneur inside a corporation. Last week, she opened the first Hurley/Converse/Nike store, in Orange County, California. The Hurley brand is for surfers and skateboarders and other cool kids. Converse, she says, has particularly broad appeal–from high school kids to musicians to “my mother-in-law, who is 87 years old and wears Converse.”

The family dynamic–usually a complication when executives, especially women, return to big jobs–is alright for Jackson. At least until her son heads off to SMU this fall, she’s commuting from California to Oregon, where Nike is based. Husband Doug, a retired airline pilot, is flexible and always has been. “I could take any job and he would just relocate,” Jackson says. (He has his own passion: cars. He owns the Batmobile–one of four built in 1966 for Batman on TV.)

Jackson, meanwhile, has simplified her business extracurriculars. She quit the boards of Nordstrom and Harrah’s Entertainment, as well as Nike. The one board she’s staying on: McDonald’s. After all, you can never get enough lessons in smart retailing.

Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine cover story, “The Gavinator?!?!”–about San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and the field of colorful candidates vying to succeed California Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger–was breezily entertaining. So breezy that it skipped a few important points.

And having written a Fortune cover story, “Can Meg Whitman Save California?” about one of those  gubernatorial rivals, I can’t resist weighing in…

First, on the money. It’s strange that yesterday’s New York Times story didn’t mention news that came out last week: Whitman, the former CEO of eBay (EBAY), has raised more than $6.5 million in five months since declaring her candidacy last February. That’s more than Newsom ($2.8 million) and way more than Steve Poizner and Tom Campbell, her competitors for the Republican nomination. Some 85% of her money has come from California–and she has big-name supporters there, including Cisco (CSCO) CEO John Chambers, Yahoo (YHOO) chief Carol Bartz, and Marc Andreessen, the uber-entreprenuer who happens to be the subject of a cover profile in the new issue of Fortune, released today.

Mitt Romney and John McCain have endorsed Whitman too. And though I have no desire to promote Whitman, I can’t resist mentioning that she is the anti-Sarah Palin. She’s not a quitter–which will be key in a race that is already intense and still more than a year away from the finish line. I’ve known Whitman for a decade, and I’ve learned that she’s focused. She’s grounded. She’s pragmatic. You might say that spending $50 million of your own money to compete for governor of America’s sickest state–as she suggested to me that she’s willing to do–is hardly pragmatic. (Indeed, business celebrities who have tried to buy their way to the California statehouse have blown up in the past. Remeber Al Checchi, Bill Simon, Michael Huffington…?) But after character, money counts here. Whitman has already contributed $4 million of her own money.

I also have to weigh in on the “rent-a-horse issue,” as we at Fortune have come to call it. The New York Times Magazine story yesterday mentioned–repeating a charge we’ve heard before–that our cover last March showed Whitman “holding the reins of Brandy, a regal-looking horse, although an editor at Fortune later admitted that Brandy was a rental horse and did not belong to Whitman.”

The facts, folks: Brandy belongs to a Whitman supporter in Half Moon Bay, California, near where the photo was taken. Whitman has horses of her own–nine horses, in fact–which she keeps near her family vacation home in Colorado. She’s a lifelong outdoors-woman and accomplished rider who transplanted West–which is why we proposed this cover shot. While we could have transported one of Whitman’s horses from Colorado, why put a horse through that?

It turned out, on that Saturday last February when we did the ocean-side shoot, Brandy was a very frisky animal. Whitman tamed her. Here’s one more picture that didn’t make it into the magazine…

I had breakfast today with some extraordinary college students — all women, all majoring in the sciences. That alone makes them extraordinary. After all, women constitute 46% of the U.S. workforce today. But women hold only 26% of the jobs in engineering science and technology. Fewer than 10% of American engineers are women.

The young women whom I met this morning are trying to change that, and we’re cheering them on. They make up the first class of participants in the National Math + Science Young Leaders Program, a new partnership between Fortune, ExxonMobil (XOM), and the National Math + Science Initiative.

If you read Postcards regularly, you know about the Fortune-U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership, which is another offshoot of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. That global mentoring program, launched in 2006, is a remarkable success: 32 rising stars from 23 developing countries came to the U.S. for a month this spring and were mentored by America’s top women execs. This new mentoring venture is aimed at filling a glaring gap here at home.

We already have an impressive lineup of mentors. Three of ExxonMobil’s senior women — VP of global marketing Margaret Mattix, VP of Engineering Sara Ortwein, and VP of Geoscience Pam Darwin — are mentoring college students in Texas, close to their offices. The other mentors are venture capitalist Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad, Kendle International (KNDL) CEO Candace Kendle, and Kathy Button Bell, chief marketing officer at Emerson (EMR), the $25 billion manufacturing and technology company.

And there’s one “mentor-at-large” who coaches via National Math + Science Young Leaders webinars: Sally Ride. Yes, the astronaut. Ride, a regular at the Most Powerful Women Summit, now has a company, Sally Ride Science, and has dedicated her post-orbit life to encouraging girls to go into science and math.

The young women who bravely venture in that direction — and help to ease a tech talent drought that’s only worsening — need role models more than ever. Mentee Stephanie Ren, who is an electrical engineering major and computer science minor at University of California Berkeley, noted this morning that guys outnumber girls by close to 10 to 1 in her computer science classes. Ren also said that after spending a day in Silicon Valley with Winblad recently — and meeting some of the veteran VC’s high-powered pals — she came to believe that she has a shot at living her dream: to work at Google (GOOG) someday.

Incidentally, Ren said that after Google, she envisions becoming an elementary school teacher. (I tell everyone “Don’t plan your career” — and said the same to these young women at breakfast — but I applaud Ren for aiming to “pay it forward” to the next generation of techies.)

At the least, this new National Math + Science Young Leaders Program will give smart young women a little more confidence to be pioneers. Another mentee, Therica Grosshans, who’s a geology major at the University of Houston, said this morning that visiting ExxonMobil and getting to know her mentor, Pam Darwin, changed her outlook on her own career. Says Grosshans, “She made me feel that I can get that far.”

“Right now, nothing is more important than a nimble, agile leader, who is comfortable with ambiguity and figuring it out as they go along.”

–Avon (AVP) President Liz Smith, in a discussion led by Pattie Sellers at NYU today. The panel, which also included Cece Sutton, Morgan Stanley’s (MS) new retail banking president, was hosted by Forte Foundation.

Smith and Sutton, both on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list, talked about how the global recession has altered what they seek in the talent they recruit. Smith values flexibility and a certain comfort with not knowing what tomorrow will bring–because more than ever, who can predict? Management, she said, has become “less strategic planning than scenario planning: ‘If this, then what?’”

It’s also more important than ever to be “completely transparent in order to take your people along on the journey,” Smith said. Sutton agreed, adding: “People who are successful now are great operators: Know the business and be in the weeds.” –Jessica Shambora

By Jessica Shambora

Health care reform is front and center — and an insanely complicated issue. When someone talks about simple solutions, it’s time to listen. So we were all ears when Jacqueline Kosecoff, CEO of Prescription Solutions, came by Fortune last week and sat down with us to talk about generic drugs.

Up in New York City after a day on Capitol Hill, Kosecoff was eager to talk about how her UnitedHealth Group (UNH) unit, which is a Prescription Benefits Manager (PBM) accounting for $13 billion of UnitedHealth’s $81 billion in revenue, can save the system millions of dollars. Her claim is based on a new study, released by Prescription Solutions this week, that shows a big void in consumer understanding about generics — what they are and what savings they bring.

You may already know that generics are identical to brand-name drugs, but the study found that nearly one-third of Americans either don’t know or don’t believe that. Among people who do not take generics, only 58% say it’s because there isn’t a generic alternative available. Moreover, two-thirds of survey respondents don’t realize that brand-name drugs typically cost 50-70% more than generics.

Says Kosecoff: “Many Americans erroneously believe that the most expensive drug is always the most effective drug.”

Generics have already saved the health-care system $734 billion over the past decade, according to market researcher IMS Health. Koseocoff says that a 1% uptick in generic use equates to 1.7% savings for payers, such as employers. And consumers enrolled in its drug plans typically save $20-60 per prescription by switching.

This is why Kosecoff is pushing generics hard: She talks about a “triple win” for consumers, for payers, and for Prescriptions Solutions. If  her unit delivers more value, it’s likely to get more volume and make more money. And it’s all about value these days. The study also showed stretched consumers have been cutting back on prescriptions: 27% of survey respondents said that they delayed filling, didn’t fill or didn’t take a drug in order to save money.

As the generic market grows, the biggest loser is Big pharma, whose brand-name drugs inevitably lose share. Through 2013, $134 billion in branded drugs are at risk from generic competition in eight key drug markets, according to IMS Health. Popular drugs like Pfizer’s (PFE) Lipitor, GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) Valtrex, and Boehringer Ingelheim’s Flomax are among the drugs with patents set to expire fairly soon.

As Kosecoff works to spur that generics market — and cut costs for Prescription Solutions’ customers — she’s pushing another item on her agenda: cheaper alternatives for biologics. These drugs, such as Amgen’s (AMGN) arthritis drug Enbrel and Abbott’s (ABBT) Humira, also for arthritis and for Crohn’s Disease, are the fastest-growing area of pharmaceuticals — a market expected to hit $90 billion this year, up from $40 billion in 2005. But generics don’t exist for biologics, which are made from living organisms rather than the small molecules of conventional pharma.

Kosecoff wants to change that. And she’s calling for Congress to help make it happen. ”A regulatory approval pathway for follow-on version of thes biologic drugs must be created,” she says.

(To read an update on the debate this Postcard ignited, click here.)

Gerri Elliott, one of Microsoft’s (MSFT) star execs, left the company early this year to spend more time with her family. Yes, seriously to spend time with her family. As I wrote in January, her departure was a major loss for Microsoft, according to senior executives there, and it was also a case of a powerful woman asking, “Why kill myself and miss my kids growing up?”

Now Elliott, who spent 22 years at IBM (IBM) before moving to Microsoft and heading the $8 billion Worldwide Public Sector unit there, has finished her hands-on familial gig and hasn’t taken long to find a new one back in the business world. Today, Juniper Networks (JNPR) announced that Elliott is coming on board in a new position crafted for her: EVP of Strategic Alliances.

Elliotts’s friends and former colleagues aren’t surprised. She and Juniper’s CEO, Kevin Johnson, have known each other for two decades, going back to their stints together at IBM and Microsoft. In fact, Elliott says she remembers the day 17 years ago when Johnson walked into her IBM office and told her he was leaving to go to upstart Microsoft. He asked her if she would take him back if he screwed up. Little did Johnson know — or Elliott either — that he would rise to head Microsoft’s biggest business, Windows, and one of its toughest, search.

For a decade, Johnson tried to hire Elliott at Microsoft. But she was a bleed-Blue loyalist. Caving in 2001, she flew from Connecticut to Seattle on September 10. Her first day at Microsoft was 9/11. Between running the company’s enterprise business in the Americas, co-heading the Americas organization, and leading the global Public Sector, Elliott handled some of Microsoft’s largest customers–which include countries and government agencies.

After she left in January, she followed the advice of a good friend: She didn’t take headhunter calls for two months. “I wanted and needed this break with my daughter,” Elliott, 53, told me in an email today. But the phone didn’t stop ringing, and eventually she considered CEO positions at start-ups, a president post at a Fortune 500 company,and COO and EVP jobs at several tech companies.

The only thing that really excited her was working with Johnson again. “He’s an exec who cares about the whole person,” she says — and he proved his worth by agreeing to put in Elliott’s Juniper employment contract that she’ll be able to go to the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. That’s the annual confab that I chair, and yes, I was shocked when Elliott told me that this event is so important to miss.)

Also in Elliott’s new contract: permission to participate in the annual Fortune – U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. This is a program that brings rising-star women from developing countries to shadow American women who participate in the MPWomen Summit. Since we launched the program in 2006, Elliott has been one of the program’s most supportive mentors.

So Johnson has lured Elliott to Silicon Valley by tailoring the job to her. The other clincher, she says: Juniper values partnerships. “I mean really values them, like it’s in their DNA,” she says. Elliott will hit the ground running and work to fortify the networking giant’s existing partnership with Nokia (NOK), Siemens (SI) and IBM.  Actually, she’s hard at work already. When I checked in with her earlier today, she was on the road with Johnson, visiting a Fortune 500 giant and trying to strike another major alliance. — Pattie Sellers

Betsy Morgan is out as CEO of HuffingtonPost.com — and her firing came as a surprise to her, Morgan told me when we connected by phone late this afternoon.

“Bummer.” That was the first word she uttered in our conversation. Morgan says she’s not bitter, however. After all, what a ride Arianna’s web venture has been these past 20 months. Morgan joined in October 2007 — and I remember it well because she was at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit as the news of her hiring hit the papers. Just hours after Arianna Huffington, Morgan’s boss, introduced her new CEO to the 300 women leaders gathered in California, Morgan was called back east. Her mother had died suddenly.

It was a dramatic start of a dramatic 20-month ride. Back in the fall of 2007, HuffPo, as the site has come to be known, was attracting 1.2 million unique visitors a month. This past April, it drew 5.6 million uniques, according to ComScore. While traffic more than quintupled, revenues doubled. The Huffington Post morphed from a political to a mainstream site. And the company, which has raised some $35 million, is edging toward profitability.

Replacing Morgan as CEO is Softbank Capital’s Eric Hippeau, a media-industry venture capitalist who has been on the HuffPo board since 2006. Morgan could have stayed at the company in a lesser role, but she doesn’t want to do that. So, what’s next? She’s asking herself. “My biggest question is,” she told me, “Do I help fix an old media business or do I help grow a new one?”

Having joined HuffPo from CBS (CBS), where she ran CBS News’ digital arm, Morgan knows both sides of the media business. “God, I’ve seen so much of that side where you invent differently and innovate differently,” she says. “But I also know so many media companies that have gone halfway into digital. Do I go help them with that?”

As she contemplates her future, she’ll attract her own traffic — headhunters, that is. Arianna may help her decide her next act. The parting between these two powerful women is neither pleasant nor easy, but it’s amicable. “I loved working with Betsy,” Huffington told me today. “We talked every morning at 7:30. It was always a partnership. And she was always a class act.”

Before Morgan and I ended our conversation, I asked her what she learned from the reigning diva of digital. “Arianna taught me that everything you do, you should do with passion and a sense of humor,” Morgan says. Oh, and one other thing, she said: “The sky’s the limit.”