Chancellor Alistair Darling says that laws will be introduced to tighten the rules governing the UK banking system.

His comments came in a BBC interview as the world digested the fate of two of Wall Street’s historic banks – Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

He called the resulting turmoil in global shares inevitable, but added that “on the positive side” UK regulators were taking action.

Separately, UK bank Barclays said it is looking to buy certain Lehman assets.

Speaking to the BBC, Mr Darling said that governments, central banks and regulators around the world have made it clear they will do “everything that they possibly can to maintain stability in the financial system”.

He said this was demonstrated on Monday after the Bank of England, European Central Bank and US Federal Reserve all made billions of dollars of additional funds available to help out the money markets.

But he added: “Now that doesn’t mean that any government or regulator can say to people ‘look, nothing is going to go wrong’, and that we can somehow stop the huge economic forces and changes that are taking place at the moment.

“But what it does mean as we showed with Northern Rock last year, that there we had a problem; if we hadn’t done something about it, it could have infected the rest of the banking system so we took action and eventually we had to take Northern Rock over.”

News reported by The BBC