The president said he would send to Congress a package calling for a new “oversight council” to study regulatory gaps and issues that do not fit into the traditional framework; creation of an agency to monitor the financial system’s stability, not just the health of individual institutions, and enhancement of the Federal Reserve’s regulatory powers. The overall goal, he said, is to avoid the kind of middle-of-the-night telephone calls and unpalatable decisions that accompanied the current situation — letting big companies fail, or prop them up with taxpayers’ money, for instance.

Obama said his goal was “a system that works for business and consumers,” one that will enhance “honest, vigorous competition” rather than reward gimmickry.

President Obama’s plan to reshape financial regulation is the product of weeks of meetings among government officials, financial experts, lawmakers, industry executives and lobbyists, many of whom were invited to help the White House draft the proposal. Obama told reporters on Tuesday that a “lack of oversight” allowed what he called “wild risk-taking.” He said it led to “very dangerous” conditions that imperiled the global economy. Obama blamed the financial crisis on “a culture of irresponsibility” that he said had taken root from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street, and he said regulations crafted to deal with the depression of the 1930s had been “overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st century global economy.”

The plan announced by the president would give the Federal Reserve greater supervisory authority over large financial institutions whose problems pose potential risks to the economic system. In doing so, the plan seeks to give Washington the tools to police the shadow system of finance that has grown up outside the government’s purview, and to make it easier for regulators to head off problems at large, troubled institutions or take control of them if they fail. “Unfortunately the growth of the nonbank sector as well as all the complexities and financial instruments outstripped those old regulatory regimes,” Obama said in an interview on Tuesday with The New York Times and CNBC.

Although it would strikingly reorganize the regulatory architecture, the president’s plan results from many compromises with industry executives and lawmakers, and is not as bold as some had hoped. Obama seemed to acknowledge as much when he posed the question: “Did, you know, any considerations of sort of politics play into it? We want to get this thing passed, and, you know, we think that speed is important. We want to do it right. We want to do it carefully. But we don’t want to tilt at windmills.”

At the White House and the Treasury Department in recent weeks, some insurance companies sought a law that would enable them to get a single federal charter instead of multiple state charters. The insurers lost. Consumer groups argued against the banks in favour of a consumer financial protection agency with broad new authority to protect homeowners from unsuitable loans. The consumer groups prevailed.