by Calculated Risk on 4/18/2008 10:03:00 AM

The WSJ MarketBeat Blog is Live-Blogging the Citigroup Earnings Call. Here are a few excerpts:

On headcount reductions ...

9:41 a.m.: Jason Goldberg of Lehman Brothers wants to know about the head count reductions. ... Mr. Crittenden [Citi CFO] ... notes that about 7,000 of the 9,000 eliminated comes from the consumer business. Mr. Goldberg wants to know about total headcount reductions — including attrition and job losses. Mr. Crittenden estimates it in the 16,000 range.

On Earnings Visibility:

9:48 a.m.: [Meredith Whitney of Oppenheimer & Co.] wants to know about “earnings visibility” for the rest of the year, noting that the firm is going to have “persistent restructuring charges and sort of more moving parts than less moving parts.” She wants to know when “you think you’re going to turn the corner.” Mr. Crittenden first notes that if reduced values on certain assets were removed, “revenues would have been roughly flat.” He notes that the environment is rough — increases in credit-card losses, poor housing fundamentals and rising unemployment. “We are in unprecedented territory from a real-estate standpoint,” he says.

Mr. Crittenden continues. “We could, in fact, be facing head winds ... and we are dedicated to ongoing reengineering ... we’re going to try and operate the business in such a way that provides some consistency going forward but nonetheless you’re right in what you said about noise. Operating leverage is going to be a difficult thing to measure us on for awhile.” He says that difficulty will come from the continued divesture of businesses, and “that’s a lumpy process almost by definition.

“There’s no assurance that the amount of marks that we have taken in this quarter are finished. We’re three quarters into this. I think we have substantially reduced our amount of risk but there’s also the prospect that you could have additional marks, and that throws the calculation of that number pretty much out the window. What I would say is that I think you should hold us accountable for a couple things that we make significant progress on headcount and that we make significant progress that is discernible in our numbers on expenses.”