One of Wall Street's most influential analysts has predicted a further $11 billion (£5.6 billion) of writedowns at Citigroup when the banking giant reports its first-quarter figures on Friday.

Meredith Whitney, the first analyst to forecast correctly that Citigroup would need to cut its dividend to prop up its finances, said that she expected a writedown, which would be on top of $18 billion of writedowns in the third and fourth quarters. It would mean that Citigroup would record an overall group loss of nearly $7 billion in the first quarter.

Merrill Lynch, the biggest American banking casualty of the credit crunch, with $24 billion of writedowns so far, will report its latest losses on Thursday, the day before Citigroup.

Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein, expects the group to take a $4.5 billion writedown for the first quarter. Ms Whitney believes that the figure will be $6 billion, giving the group an overall loss of $3 a share. Mr Hintz is forecasting a group loss of $1.60 a share, compared with a profit of $2.26 a share the previous year.

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Mr Hintz said: “With $30 billion of collatoralised debt obligations [high-risk and complex securities] still on Merrill's balance sheet at the end of 2007, we believe the ‘CDO overhang' will be an ongoing concern for the firm over the next 24 months.”

JPMorgan Chase has faired much better than most of its rivals in the sub-prime crisis, yet still the bank is expected to take a $2.8 billion writedown when it announces its first-quarter results on Wednesday. Analysts forecast that this will push the bank's profit for the period down to seven cents a share, from $1.34 a share a year ago.

Washington Mutual (WaMu), which agreed a $7 billion cash injection last week, is among the other American banks still thought to have more big writedowns to come. The savings and loans institution will take a $14 billion writedown on its remaining sub-prime mortgage portfolio for the year, James Fotherington, a Goldman Sachs analyst said. WaMu announced an overall group loss of $1.1 billion, or $1.40 a share, for the first quarter last week as it nearly doubled its forecast writedowns on credit securities to $3.5 billion.

UBS, the European bank most damaged by the credit crunch, said at the weekend that it had weathered the worst of its problems. Marcel Rohner, chief executive of Switzerland's largest bank, said that it was “no longer at the lowest point.

“There are certain factors that we cannot influence, however, such as the US real estate market. There, there is volatility,” he told SonntagsZeitung. “But we are strong enough to manage our risks and our positions. Now it is about winning back the destroyed trust on the customer side.”

Mr Rohner said that trading had picked up in areas where there had been no markets for months. “This is generally a sign that an end [of the financial crisis] is foreseeable,” he said.

The UBS chief said that he would reveal next month how many jobs would go at the bank, but he insisted that estimates of 3,000 to 4,000 redundancies in its investment banking business were too high.

Peter Kurer, who has been proposed by the UBS board as a replacement for outgoing chairman Marcel Ospel, told Neue Zuercher Zeitung that UBS's writedowns could not get any worse because they had already been so aggressive. The bank has taken a $37 billion hit on credit-related assets and has asked investors for SwFr28 billion (£14.2 billion) worth of emergency cash.

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