Citigroup cuts value of investments by $14 billion

The nation’s largest bank lost $5.1 billion in the first quarter.

NEW YORK (AP) — Citigroup’s 9,000 job cuts and $14 billion in write-downs suggest that even if the worst of the credit market volatility is over, the industry is now in a conservative, cost-cutting mode.

With banks expecting more loans to go sour, people can expect tight lending standards for many months — perhaps years — to come.

“Underwriting standards have to be high. That’s the way to dampen potential losses you might face,” said chief financial officer Gary Crittenden in an interview with The Associated Press. He said that historically, deterioration in consumer credit has taken eight to 10 quarters, or at least two years, for rates of delinquency and default to recover.

Citigroup Inc. is struggling with not only a troubling lending environment in the United States, but also a dented portfolio of investments. The bank’s write-downs, plus more than $3 billion in costs related to consumers’ credit problems, led it to report a first-quarter loss Friday of $5.1 billion, or $1.02 a share.

The most recent quarterly shortfall at the nation’s biggest bank by assets was not as massive as the nearly $10 billion loss it suffered in the fourth quarter of last year. Since many investors had been bracing for even more dismal results, Citigroup shares jumped $1.07, or 4.5 percent, to $25.10 in late afternoon trading Friday.

But it is hardly smooth sailing for the bank from this point on. Citigroup essentially lost in the first three months of the year what it earned in the same period in 2007 — $5 billion, or $1.01 per share. Analysts, on average, had expected the New York bank to lose 95 cents per share, according to Thomson Financial.

“We’re not happy with our financial results this quarter — although they’re not completely unexpected, given the assets we hold,” said chief executive Vikram Pandit during a conference call.

Because Citigroup has lost so much money, it has announced 13,200 job cuts since the credit crisis began slamming the banking industry last summer. The bank announced 4,200 cuts in January, about 9,000 on Friday, and suggested more work-force reductions are likely.

“We’re very, very focused on efficiency,” Pandit said during the analyst call.

To be sure, it appears that Citigroup, like most other large banks, has already been aggressive in writing down its assets to market value, and that the biggest write-downs may have been taken already. Write-downs in the first quarter were $4 billion less than the fourth quarter’s $18.1 billion.

Citigroup’s $14.1 billion in first-quarter write-downs include $7 billion related to subprime and alt-A mortgages; $3.1 billion related to leveraged loans; $1.5 billion related to bond insurers; $1.5 billion on auction-rate securities; and another $1 billion related to commercial real estate, a hedge fund and funds known as structured investment vehicles.