Australian central bank Governor Glenn Stevens has urged other monetary authorities to implement for "regulation that would not undermine economic growth or push risk taking underground.

"The reforms do need to be carefully calibrated with an eye to potential unintended consequences," Stevens told a gathering of economists in Sydney today.

He said that "one such consequence, obviously, would be unnecessarily to crimp growth if the reforms are not well designed and/or implementation not well handled."

Stevens said in the light of debates that regulators and central bankers and governments from around the globe are engaged in to re-shape the financial system to prevent a repeat of the 2008 credit crisis that pushed the global economy into its worst recession since World War II, Stevens said.

His remarks come less than a week after the U.S. Senate passed the biggest overhaul of financial- industry regulation since the Great Depression.

"In a nutshell, what regulators are pushing toward is a global banking system characterized by more capital and lower leverage, bigger holdings of liquid assets and undertaking less maturity transformation," Stevens said.

"It is hoped that this system will display greater resilience to adverse developments than the one that grew up during the 1990s and 2000s," he said.