Bankers who helped to cause the global economic crisis should not be shunned but included in the hunt for a solution, the head of the World Economic Forum said today.

Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, which opens today in Davos, Switzerland, called for unity and said that executives from troubled financial institutions had their part to play in finding a way out of the current economic crisis.

“Those people, and there are many of those here, have the feeling they are standing at a cliff and they may fall over at any moment,” Mr Schwab said in a speech to mark the opening of the 39th annual forum.

“But those people are not only part of the problem," he said. "They are part of the solution.

"We need a well-functioning financial community, we should not forget. Otherwise, we don’t have a well-functioning economy.”

Senior officers from Citigroup, Bank of America and UBS AG, all of them facing severe financial problems, are among the Davos audience that will mingle this year with more than 40 world leaders.

The leaders include Gordon Brown and other prime ministers: Wen Jiabao, of China, Vladimir Putin, of Russia, Taro Aso, of Japan, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, and José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Union.

Mr Putin is to give the keynote address this evening, even as Russia’s bankers and energy tycoons struggle with debt and plunging oil prices.

Mr Schwab said that the Davos summit was a chance for bankers and politicians to discuss the crises facing the world's economies — caused, he said, by a failure to address the needs of society — and a formula for solving them.

"It's an overlapping of different crises, we have the crisis that was caused by an imbalance in our economies, we have a financial crisis, we have a confidence crisis and above all we have a systems crisis," Mr Schwab said in an interview with the BBC.

"Everyone feels isolated, everyone wants to understand. Bringing the people together, the politicians, business leaders and particularly also experts to sit together and to try to find out what really happened, I think this is exactly this year what Davos is about."

Mr Schwab said that those who were attending Davos needed to focus on identifying the mistakes that had been made and debating how to reset the world's financial systems.

Times Recommends

• Toyota recalls 437,000 cars including Lexus
• Myners says bonuses are bleeding pension funds
• Japanese company faked safety reports on seats