The poor card player does not fold. The poor card player calls and then stays in the game, praying that the one card in the deck that can help him falls and saves the hand.

For anyone that’s followed Citigroup’s latest undertakings, it would appear as if they are just that sucker sitting at the table. Investors.com reports that the investment banking giant might just write down $1.1 billion in subprime mortgage losses this quarter alone and it does not end there. Hoping that their financial woes will not get any worse than they already are, Citigroup plans to write down $8 billion to $11 billion before taxes for its $55 billion worth of exposure to the never-ending US credit crunch.

As of last quarter, the bank’s lingering profits dropped their share price 3 cents a share. It also had to deal with $6.5 billion in subprime-related losses in the same quarter.

All of the aforementioned was announced just this Sunday, not more than a month after the bank assured its investors that it had a “good, sustainable strategic plan” for getting itself out of the mess that they, like many of their contemporaries, are all currently experiencing.

Normally, investors will gladly listen to what a firm has to say and will do their best to give the people they’ve invested in the benefit of the doubt their portfolios deserve. The rather unfortunate part for Citigroup is that 2007 does not fall under ‘normal’. With the subprime disaster claiming more and more victims with every passing day, investor confidence is down and many people aren’t willing to listen to what appear to be empty promises.

"Maybe they could have taken off $10 billion to $15 billion," said Kris Niswander, senior banking analyst at SNL Financial. "Whether or not that was aggressive enough is yet to be seen."

Whatever is in the cards for Citigroup, ex-CEO Chuck Prince will not be dealt into the hand. Prince resigned from the investment bank this past Sunday. Prince’s departure came just a week after Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal left his post, following an $8.4 billion write-down, a figure that was 50 percent higher than the company had previously forecast.

Adding to Citigroup’s current state of disarray, the bank’s shares fell almost five percent Monday, to a 4 ½ year low of $35.90. And Citigroup was not alone; Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Bros. dropped 5.8 percent, 4.9 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively.

And as Citigroup does what it can to work through the mess that they are currently in, many close to the market are beginning to wonder exactly who will take the next big hit. For now, the two leading contenders are Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns, an obvious choice considering the early-summer, highly-publicized collapse of two of their most prized hedge funds.

"You should expect to see a whole bunch of losses being reported by a whole bunch of companies over the next few weeks," said analyst Richard Bove of Punk Ziegel. "They'll point not only to Merrill and Citi, but the fact that ratings agencies have lowered their ratings on a number of securities. When the rating goes down, the value of the security goes down, and a loss has to be taken."

At this moment in time, investors.com insists that the risk surrounding future write-downs revolves greatly around the chance of unexpected inflation leading to a hike in interest rates at some point in the near future.

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