World Crisis Online

An attendee arrives for the second day of the WEF Annual Meeting in Davos on Thursday. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg

The chief executive officers of banks including Bank of America Corp., Barclays Plc, Credit Suisse Group AG, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and UBS AG met behind closed doors in Davos, Switzerland, today to discuss regulation, the sovereign crisis and political intervention in the markets.

Barclays CEO Robert Diamond and Tidjane Thiam of insurer Prudential Plc co-chaired the gathering, an annual event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner arrived to speak to the group after Diamond presented an “industry issue matrix” for discussion among the participants, who also included top executives from Standard Chartered Plc and Perella Weinberg Partners LP. The list of issues was visible through a window into the meeting room.

The matrix contained five items for discussion: Interplay and unintended consequences of proposals to regulate institutions; threats of sovereign debt default, fiscal weaknesses and contagion in the euro zone; reactions to policymakers’ increasing propensity to intervene in markets; financial innovation and appropriate institutional structures; and successful business in a low-yield environment.

Thiam, during a break in the discussion, said executives planned to ask Geithner for “more certainty” about financial regulation. “We are aware something needs to change,” Thiam said in an interview.

‘Economic Growth’ Rather than opposing each other, financiers and regulators are “really trying to be together so you can get both safety, regulatory certainty and economic growth,” said attendee Howard Lutnick, CEO of New York-based securities firm Cantor Fitzgerald LP. “If you just keep the first two you don’t get the third.”

Participants in the meeting included Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, the largest U.S. lender by assets; Brady Dougan of Credit Suisse, the second-largest Swiss bank; Peter Sands of Standard Chartered, the U.K. bank that doubled its headcount over the past five years; Oswald Gruebel of UBS, Switzerland’s biggest lender; and Peter Weinberg of Perella Weinberg, the New York investment bank founded in 2006.