Bear Stearns teetered on the brink of bankruptcy after nearly $16 billion in liquidity evaporated in a matter of days.

Invoking the specter of that violent near collapse, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox, announced today that the commission would require Wall Street banks to disclose their liquidity and capital levels on a more regular basis and "in terms that the market can readily understand and digest."

After a speech before a conference of the Security Traders Association in Washington, D.C., Cox told reporters, "The idea is to provide current information to the markets," Reuters reported.

Shares of financial services companies fell sharply after the speech, apparently on worries that further disclosure could reveal additional problems.

"The market is obviously worried about what will be disclosed,'' Janna Sampson, co-chief investment officer at Lisle, Illinois-based Oakbrook Investments, told Bloomberg News. "From an investor's perspective, you want to know the firm you are invested in has a strong capital standing. Why these firms wouldn't disclose this data is a mystery.''

In his speech, Cox noted that Bear met all the regulatory requirements. "The Bear Stearns experience demonstrated, however, that the prevailing measurements of capital and liquidity that were then being used by the S.E.C. and by every bank and securities regulator, not only here in the United States but around the world, were inadequate to prevent or predict the run on the bank that Bear endured," Cox said.

The S.E.C. has been criticized for not keeping a closer watch on Bear Stearns, failing to spot signs that the firm was in danger.

"Some people think that the S.E.C. missed the boat here, was asleep," Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, said at an April 3 Senate Banking Committee hearing.

Cox also called on Congress to give the S.E.C. the power to regulate Wall Street banks in their entirety, not just their broker-dealer operations.

"Very soon, the S.E.C. —or if not the S.E.C., then another regulator —must be given the express authority and a regime appropriately tailored to securities firms to supervise the nation's investment banks on a consolidated basis," he said.