Alistair Darling and Barack Obama were tonight presenting two very different views on how to prevent another financial crisis.

Obama launched plans for a major restructuring of the regulatory bodies, granting more power to the central Federal Reserve bank to monitor big-picture risks to the American financial system. The Fed will also be charged with regulating the banks which are so big they would threaten the US economy if they collapsed.

Obama also proposed abolishing unpopular bank regulator the Office of Thrift Supervision and launching a new watchdog to regulate consumer-facing financial businesses like mortgage and credit card operators. He said: "There is going to be streamlining - consolidation - so that you don't find people falling through the gaps. It's going to be a much more effectively integrated system than previously."

Darling was using his Mansion House speech tonight to stress the need to improve existing corporate governance rather than create new institutions to regulate the markets. He will advocate sticking with the current tripartite system where regulation is carried out by the Financial Services Authority, the Treasury and the Bank of England.

Governments around the world are attempting to find better ways of regulating. In London, private-equity firms and hedge funds are desperately trying to fight off European plans that would force them to hold bigger sums in reserve, crimping their ability to make large leveraged investments.

Obama hinted to Bloomberg today that financial firms should stop complaining about state intervention in their affairs: "Wall Street seems to maybe have a shorter memory about how close we were to the abyss than I would have expected."