WASHINGTON  The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke, told skeptical lawmakers on Thursday that the Fed should be put in charge of regulating the nation’s biggest financial institutions.

But in a nod to critics who have expressed alarm about the Fed’s immense power during the financial crisis, Mr. Bernanke said responsibility for monitoring broader risks in the financial system should go to a council of regulators.

“We have never supported, and the administration has never supported, a situation in which the Fed would be some kind of untrammeled super-regulator,” he told members of the House Financial Services Committee.

Mr. Bernanke said the Fed would be merely one of several players on the new council, and he endorsed the Obama administration’s proposal to have the Treasury lead that council. The council, he said, would pool the expertise of individual regulatory agencies and make it easier to identify and coordinate their reaction to risks that ripple across different institutions and markets.