Washington  - US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Wednesday urged Congress to ensure passage of the Obama administration's proposals to overhaul financial regulation, saying "time is the enemy of reform."

In testimony to the House Financial Services Committee, Geithner said: "The flaws in our financial system and regulatory framework that allowed this crisis to occur, and in many ways helped cause it, are still in place."

He said that "we may disagree over details of how to best fix those flaws, but that cannot mean we do not act."

Geithner cautioned that recent signs of economic recovery should not become a cause for complacency. He urged Congress to pass legislation that would provide greater protection for consumers and investors, create a safer financial system and ensure that taxpayers don't have to bear the burden of another banking bail-out.

The administration's proposal for the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency has been criticized by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke - who himself has been targeted for failing to ward off a devastating financial crisis.

Bernanke said he had reservations about such an agency, which would strip the US central bank of powers to protect consumers from unfair or misleading practices by banks.

While the Obama administration wants to give the Fed new powers to watch over the country's top banks, it wants to put a single new agency in charge of protecting consumers, many of whom were duped into taking home loans with high interest rates they could not afford.

A record number of foreclosures by US homeowners - more than 3 million in 2008 - is largely blamed for causing the Wall Street crisis, which is considered to be the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The defaults have cost banks hundreds of billions of dollars.

Many lawmakers are resisting the idea of giving more powers to the same government regulators that were unable to foresee the crisis, especially the Fed. dpa