The US Federal Reserve is on the point of expanding its Wall Street role by adding the regulation of investment banks to its existing responsibilities of commercial banking and bank holding companies.

The extension of the central bank's remit, which could be announced as soon as this week, is part of a broader restructuring of how Wall Street is regulated in the aftermath of the near-collapse of Bear Stearns in March. Although the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will continue to be the ultimate regulatory authority for the investment banks, it will share with the Fed data on areas such as their trading positions and leverage levels.

In return, the Fed will give to the commission data about loans made by the commercial banks that it regulates.

The SEC will also expand its role as part of the restructure to include oversight of the commercial banks, for which the Fed will continue to be the ultimate regulator.

The new data-sharing agreement, part of a broader long-term overhaul of Wall Street regulation, will help to address criticism that the SEC did not act decisively enough as a run on Bear Stearns from nervous lenders and investors brought it to the brink of collapse.

The Federal Reserve and the Treasury, rather than the SEC, played the central role in negotiating a fire sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan, without which Bear would have gone to the wall. Had the SEC been equipped with a clearer sense of the extent to which commercial banks were pulling away from Bear - as it would have if the proposed system of data sharing had been in place - it would have been able to act more quickly and decisively, according to one insider at the US watchdog.

An SEC spokesman said: “The purpose of the agreement is to improve each agency's access to information from the other and to expand the regulatory realm of each to protect investors and guard against systemic risk.”

Wall Street pulled $10.4 billion (£5.3 billion) of cash and other highly liquid assets out of Bear Stearns on March 13, leaving it with only $2 billion as rumours spread about liquidity problems at the bank.

JPMorgan agreed to buy Bear that month for a fraction of its recent trading value but only after the Fed agreed to guarantee nearly $30 billion of the bank's most toxic remaining sub-prime mortgage-related assets.

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