Wall St. CEOs: More credit worries

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Credit markets continued to weigh on the minds of some high-profile Wall Street CEOs Tuesday, with at least two key execs warning of more gloom in the months ahead.

Offering perhaps the bleakest outlook was BlackRock (Charts) Chief Executive Laurence Fink, who warned that more mortgage-related problems loom for Wall Street.

"It's going to get a lot worse," Fink said, speaking on the first day of Merrill Lynch's Banking and Financial Services Investor Conference, a three-day event in New York featuring some of the top names in the financial services industry.

Fink, mentioned as a candidate for the CEO vacancy at Merrill Lynch (Charts, Fortune 500), said the credit markets will not fully recover until some mortgage-related assets, which include a variety of complex securities backed by home loans, are liquidated.

"The bottom has not been achieved yet," Fink said. "There have been no liquidations."

Bank of America (Charts, Fortune 500) Chief Financial Officer Joseph Price echoed those sentiments by announcing that his firm would take at least $3 billion in writedowns in the fourth quarter amid continued housing market weakness.

Big banks and brokerages have remained the center of Wall Street's attention since this summer's market meltdown. So far, the crisis has led to more than $30 billion in writedowns and the ouster of two high-profile Wall Street CEOs - Merrill Lynch's Stanley O'Neal and Citigroup's (Charts, Fortune 500) Charles Prince.

Goldman Sachs' (Charts, Fortune 500) CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who also delivered remarks Tuesday, helped send financial markets higher after he bluntly denied recent speculation that the company would follow its peers by taking multi-billion dollar writedowns.

Blankfein acknowledged it was exposed to about $50 billion worth of so-called "level 3' assets - which can include such instruments as leveraged buyout loans. But he said he was "confident" in the value of those assets.

"We believe we have a pretty good grip on the valuation of these things," said Blankfein.

Goldman Sachs appeared to have averted the credit crisis when it delivered better-than-expected third-quarter earnings in September.

Also speaking at the conference was JPMorgan Chase (Charts, Fortune 500) CEO Jamie Dimon, who stressed the health of his company's loan portfolio - just days after revealing in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it could be the source of further writedowns.

"We think we're fine," said Dimon.

Dimon also speculated that big changes were likely for many of the troubled structured finance products that Wall Street had relied on for years.

Dimon said he expected structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, which were sellers of commercial paper and buyers of mortgage-backed securities, would go "the way of the dinosaur."

He also expected a contraction in the business for collateralized debt obligations, or pools of bonds that are sliced into so-called tranches with different levels of credit risk.