Citi by the Numbers

Citi announced a total of $15.2 billion in writedowns and credit losses. It breaks down in the following way. A loss of $6 billion in pre-tax dollars for write downs and credit costs on subprime exposure. Their total exposure in October of last year was $53 billion and is now down to $29.1 billion. Roughly $16.8 billion of that is in asset backed paper with a very good remittance performance. They took a $3.1 billion dollar write down in highly leveraged loans. At the end of Q4 they had $43 billion in leveraged loan exposure. It is now down to $28 billion. They took a downward credit adjustment of $1.5 billion related to monoline exposure and write-down's of $1.5 billion on auction rate securities and $3.1 billion increase in credit costs in their global consumer business. In aggregate they wrote off or took losses on a total of $15.2 billion.

A couple key crucial points:

1. As originally reported by our partners at The Wall Street Journal a week ago, they made a sale of $12 billion dollars of leveraged loans late last night. I assume we will get more details on this mornings conference call.

2. Investment banking while not pretty was much better than Merrill's investment banking numbers yesterday. They reported a flat quarter in their investment banking unit while Merrill reported a 26% loss.

3. They will cut 9,000 jobs. This on top of 4,250 last quarter. Although they indicated that they will revisit those cost cutting initiatives on a quarter by quarter basis. I would assume there will be many more to come. After all they do employ 370,000 people.

4. Their capital ratios or Tier One Capital Ratio's are now at 7.7%. That is up from 7.1%. A significant improvement!

All in all a pretty big kitchen sink quarter after the sales of their Citi Capital Business, the Redecard shares and Diners Club International and last night's sale of a portion of their highly leveraged loan portfolio. Their building up the balance sheet and as Pandit indicated, "divest businesses that do not fit with the rest of the group."

Let's see how they do on today's conference call. This press release could take hours to fully understand.