From CNN.....NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Citigroup's losing...

From CNN.....


NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Citigroup's losing streak continued Thursday as the company reported a $2.8 billion loss, as it once again took a series of painful writedowns on its mortgage-related investments.

During the third quarter, the company said it lost $2.8 billion, or 60 cents a share. A year ago, the company reported a profit of $2.21 billion, or 44 cents a share.

The loss, which was the fourth consecutive for Citigroup, was smaller-than-expected. Analysts were expecting a loss of 70 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters.

"While our third quarter results reflect both a difficult environment as well as continued write-downs on our legacy assets, we are making excellent progress on the parts of our business we control, including expense reduction, headcount, and balance sheet and capital management," Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit said in a statement.

Driving down the results were a series of writedowns, including a $3.9 billion charge to increase its loan loss reserves and a $4.4 billion writedown in the company securities and banking division.

Investors, however, seemed cautiously optimistic about the results. Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) shares rose nearly 5% in pre-market trading following a 13% loss Wednesday.

Still, Citigroup's report is yet another dose of bad news for both the New York City-based bank and the overall financial sector. Merrill Lynch (MER, Fortune 500), the investment bank that agreed last month to sell itself to Bank of America, announced a bigger-than-expected loss Thursday morning.

Fearing further fallout in the banking sector both domestically and abroad, government officials around the world enacted measures in recent days to help prop up the industry.

As part of that plan, top U.S. regulators unveiled plans to inject $250 billion into the nation's banking system, with half of that amount going to nine major financial institutions including Citigroup, as well as rivals JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) and Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500).

And last week, Citigroup pulled out of its plans to buy Wachovia's (WB, Fortune 500) banking assets after it could not reach an agreement with Wells Fargo on how to split Wachovia's assets.

Although Cit's proposed deal was brokered by the FDIC and prevented Wachovia from failing, Wells Fargo (WFC, Fortune 500) subsequently made an offer to buy all of Wachovia. That deal was approved by the Federal Reserve over the weekend.