The Cayman Islands and other offshore money centres could become convenient political targets for debt-ridden governments unless regulation is stepped up on Wall Street's biggest banks to avert another potential financial crisis, a former IMF chief economist has warned, according to Reuters.

"If they can't deal with the underlying real problems, because those banks are too powerful politically, they will look for other people to blame," Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, was quoted as saying at a recent conference in the Cayman Islands.

"Blaming offshore money centres for problems that are really centred on Wall Street's largest banks doesn't make any sense, but it could still happen," he said.

Offshore financial centres such as the Cayman Islands, Switzerland and Liechtenstein have come under increasingly fierce international pressure to open up their financial systems to make it easier for governments to chase after alleged tax evaders. Defenders of these centres say the credit crisis did not originate in tax havens, and the attack on them is a form of economic and financial protectionism.

More than a year after the global financial crisis began, there has been far too little regulatory scrutiny of the world's largest banks in the US and abroad, said Mr Johnson, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.