Investors brace for Citi report

Analysts expect a major restructuring of the banking giant will be announced with the fourth-quarter earnings Friday.

Well there may just be one more trading day left this week, but it's a big one coming up. Banking behemoth Citigroup is announcing its fourth-quarter earnings. The outlook is grim. Analysts are expecting Citi to post its fifth straight quarterly loss, the expectation by analyst survey by Thompson Reuters is for Citi to post a loss of nearly 4.5 billion dollars or $1.31cent a share. That would be a smaller loss than a year ago, but still quite sizable. Now, Citi moved its earnings announcement up to Friday morning from its scheduled release. Next week, some analysts are expecting Citi to announce a major restructuring, along with those earnings now. It is expected that reserves for loan loss provisions coupled with write-downs and minimal business activity in Citi's i-banking unit will really weigh on its numbers, but here is the upside. The result should be helped just a bit by a four-billion-dollar gain from the sale of its German retail banking business. Now, you can bet people are also gonna be looking for any indication from CEO Vikram Pandit as to whether or not he has plans to break up the firm. Also coming up on Friday, uh, two key reports. One is, uh, look at consumer inflation, that will be the CPI report for December and then a look at consumer confidence so far this month. That's all coming up on Friday. We have all the numbers for you and all the info right here.