The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke, told skeptical lawmakers on Thursday that the Fed should be put in charge of regulating the nation’s biggest financial institutions.

But in a nod to critics who have expressed alarm about the Fed’s immense power during the financial crisis, Bernanke said responsibility for monitoring broader risks in the financial system should go to a council of regulators. “We should seek to marshal the collective expertise and information of all financial supervisors to identify and respond to developments that threaten the stability of the system as a whole,” he said in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee.

A council of regulators, Bernanke said, including the agencies that now exert narrow authority over various types of financial companies, would be able to monitor risks that ripple across the financial sector as pension and hedge funds, investment banks, commercial lenders, mortgage lenders and others do business with one another and invent products and services that are especially difficult to monitor.

Bernanke asked Congress, which is working on legislation to overhaul the financial regulatory system, to “support a reorientation of individual agency mandates to include not only the responsibility to oversee the individual firms or markets within each agency’s scope of authority, but also the responsibility to try to identify and respond to the risks those entities may pose, either individually or through their interactions with other firms or markets, to the financial system more broadly.”