in New York City", and a CNBC viewer survey named her as "Power Player of the Year" over Jamie Dimon, Ben Bernanke, and Hank Paulson. On December 19, 2010, in an interview on the CBS television program 60 Minutes, Whitney stated that 50 to 100 counties, cities, and towns in the United States would have "significant" municipal bond defaults totaling "hundreds of billions" of dollars, and that "it'll be something to worry about within the next 12 months." Since the record amount of municipal bond defaults in one year was just over $8 billion at the time, Whitney's comments about hundreds of billions in defaults briefly shook the market and drew a great deal of attention, much of it critical. According to Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair: "Many of the articles attacking her accused her of making a very specific forecast — as many as a hundred defaults within a year! — that failed to materialize... But that's not at all what she had said: her words were being misrepresented so that her message might be more easily attacked. 'She was referring to the complacency of the ratings agencies and investment advisers who say there is nothing to worry about,' said a person at 60 Minutes who reviewed the transcripts of the interview for me, to make sure I had heard what I thought I had heard. She says there is something to worry about, and it will be apparent to everyone in the next 12 months." "A tale of two Americas is emerging: one weighed down by debt and facing de minimis economic growth and another brimming with opportunity and nimble to invest in the future." This was the thesis to Whitney's 2013 book, Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity. She argued that a "new map of prosperity" was emerging in the wake of the financial bust, with jobs moving away from the coasts and toward 17 "central corridor" states in the Midwest and Mountain West. Whitney's municipal debt thesis is still considered valid by at least one analyst. In January 2018 S&P Global published an analysis by Mercer Capital titled "Meredith Whitney is Still Right." A decade later, Whitney's forecast of a wave of municipal defaults has not panned out. Personal life On February 12, 2005, Whitney married John Layfield in Key West, Florida. Layfield is a former WWE Champion, former WWE color commentator,