Coming Week: Banks on Parade

The focus on financials will heat up next week, as four of the country's biggest banks report earnings and provide some color on their expectations for the remainder of the year.

Goldman Sachs (GS Quote) will kick off the bank earnings rollercoaster on Tuesday, followed by JPMorgan Chase (JPM Quote) on Thursday and Bank of America (BAC Quote) and Citigroup (C Quote) on Friday.

While it's clear that banks are still suffering through the deep recession, there's no clear consensus on where their bottom-line figures stand. For instance, the range of analyst expectations for Citi's second-quarter loss per share range from 76 cents to 5 cents, and JPMorgan per-share estimates range from a loss of 23 cents to a profit of 27 cents.

JPMorgan big-cap bank analyst Vivek Juneja says he expects the results to be "weak and very messy." Although bank revenues have been supported by government programs, they are also coping with the reality of higher credit costs as consumers and businesses remain under stress.

Given the uncertainty, along with reports from other big names like Intel (INTC Quote), Johnson & Johnson(JNJ Quote), Google(GOOG Quote) and General Electric(GE Quote), it could be a bumpy week. It would continue a trend begun this week, when Alcoa(AA Quote) reported better-than-expected results on Wednesday, followed by a warning from oil major Chevron(CVX Quote) on Thursday.

As a result, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed the week down 1.6%, after trading in a range of more than 300 points during the five sessions.

"The consensus out there is it's going to be pretty weak and dismal for the second quarter," says Larry Rosenthal, a financial planner and founder of advising firm Financial Planning Services, who doesn't believe banks will have a repeat performance of shocking first-quarter profits. "I think for the last 90 days people have been very cautiously optimistic and I think that sentiment has become more and more bearish recently."