Lehman executives gathered at the bank’s Manhattan headquarters over the weekend, fueling speculation that the bank might try to raise capital from investors or even seek a buyer. A Lehman spokeswoman declined to comment.

Lehman, which for months had assured investors that it was managing its risks well, said last week that the loss reflected $4.1 billion in write-downs of its investments.

Goldman Sachs is scheduled to report results on Tuesday, followed by Morgan Stanley on Wednesday. Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan and Merrill Lynch release results in July.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are expected to have fared better than Lehman did in the latest quarter. They are more diversified than Lehman, which has traditionally focused on fixed income. And the two banks’ commodities traders may have profited handsomely in recent months as the prices for oil and foodstuffs have soared. Even so, many investors are anxious to see whether Goldman, which made money last year even as many of its rivals lost big, has continued to dodge trouble.

The latest round of results is likely to draw special scrutiny because Wall Street firms are disclosing capital levels under new international banking standards known as Basel II. And Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and UBS are also expected to suffer from the ratings downgrades recently issued for MBIA and Ambac, two bond reinsurers.

The more that banks take write-downs, the more they are, in a sense, shredding through the record profits they made when times were good. Citigroup, for example, has written down its mortgage and other loan investments by $37.3 billion or a full half of the handsome profits the global giant pulled in during the boom years.

Merrill Lynch, much smaller in size, has taken write-downs of $32.6 billion  or a whopping 153 percent of its profits from 2004 through last summer. Even if Merrill is given credit for the money it earned in the past year, the bank still had write-downs that translated into losses of $14 billion, and that is two-thirds of its profits in those three and a half years that ended with a pop last July.