Forget all the damage control about this thing being significant but small, with localised effect… a quick tally of the chart at BBC, of losses declared thus far, comes up with about $80 billion. While that’s not in the Bush league of screw-ups (he being the genius who is spending upward of a billion dollars a week to kill Iraqis) but it sure is beginning to look like real money. And that’s not just me… read below on what Herr Wheeldon, one of the moneybag insiders (a.k.a “senior strategist”) has to say.

BBC | Citigroup’s $9.8bn sub-prime loss

[…]

Citigroup is far from alone in being hit by bad debt, but its write-off is by far the biggest announced by any bank to date.

Analysts generally welcomed the results, as the $18.1bn bad debt write down was less than market expectations of $20bn.

However, analysts had mixed views on what message cutting the dividend and selling securities sent to the market.

“It does nothing to send any signal that we are anyway near the end of the road that we’ve been going along for the past seven months, in the overall credit market woes,” said Howard Wheeldon, senior strategist at BGC partners.

Let’s see if the road leads to the sort of numbers posted by Dubya’s brother.