Goldman Sachs and other banks should give up their bank status if they want to avoid the ban on proprietary trading proposed by the White House, Paul Volcker, head of President Barack Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said.

“The implication for Goldman Sachs or any other institution is, do you want to be a bank?” Mr Volcker said in a video interview with the Financial Times. “If you don't want to follow those [banking] rules, you want to go out and do a lot of proprietary stuff, fine, but don't do it with a banking licence.”

Mr Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was thrust into the centre of the financial reform debate last month, when Mr Obama endorsed his proposal to separate proprietary trading from commercial banking, naming the policy the “Volcker Rule”.