Caution: Crumbling Wall Street earnings ahead

"It's becoming pretty obvious the writedowns will be bad, and not just in subprime, but across the credit markets," Compton said.

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Lehman and Goldman will also suffer this quarter because they have among the largest leveraged loan portfolios on Wall Street and are big players in commercial real estate. This will result in first-quarter write-downs at the two firms of $1.6 billion and $3.2 billion, respectively, wrote Citigroup analyst Prashant Bhatia in a March 7 report.