President Barack Obama has won the backing of top bankers for his efforts to rid financial institutions of bad debts but differences remained over broader US plans for the financial industry.

Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, Kenneth Lewis of Bank of America, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon and Morgan Stanley's John Mack were among 15 executives to have met President Obama at the White House and echoed his call for cooperation to help the economy.

But their statements about tough trading conditions in March overshadowed the positive spin the executives and the White House sought to give to the meeting.

“The basic message is we’re all in this thing together,” Wells Fargo chief executive John Stumpf said after the meeting.

President Obama saw the meeting as productive and frank. “Show some restraint,” President Obama said he told the bankers. “Show that you get that this is a crisis and everybody has to make sacrifices.” Asked how the bankers reacted, President Obama told CBS News: “They agreed and they recognized it. Now the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

The meeting comes just days after the US Treasury Department provided details on a government plan to cleanse banks’ balance sheets of up to $1 trillion in distressed loans and securities, a plan the banks will have to support in order for it to work.

The relationship between Wall Street and the White House has been fractured by attacks by Congress over bonuses and the bailout handed to the banks by taxpayers.

The banks' bosses are infuriated by lawmakers' attempts to pass a tax of up to 100 per cent on bonuses, which they say unfairly penalises workers that had nothing to do with the huge losses made by Wall Street and damages the companies' recovery.

Mr Pandit and Mr Dimon have particularly criticised lawmakers' determination to vilify Wall Street.

Timothy Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary, this week unveiled a plan to take toxic assets off the banks' books but his proposal requires participation by the private sector. There were fears that investors might be put off going into partnership with the Government after Congress's knee-jerk reaction to AIG's $165 million (£115 million) bonus payment this month.

The bonus tax was introduced by Congress after the Treasury failed to stop AIG, which has received $173 billion in aid from the Government, from paying the contractual bonuses.

Another hurdle to Mr Geithner's plan is the banks' unwillingness to offload their assets at prices at which investors and the Government are happy to buy.

In return for putting up to $1 trillion to purchase the toxic assets, the White House wants the banks to step up lending to consumers and businesses.

Mr Geithner will also soon unveil new regulations for the financial sector.

He said yesterday that the Government needed more power to take over and sell off distressed companies, to prevent another messy bailout such as that of AIG.

The Treasury Secretary also wants a better system of identifying risks that threaten the whole financial system, to be run by an over-arching watchdog.

But there has been criticism that this masks the problems at existing regulators.

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