Congress should set standards to protect borrowers against predatory lenders, Sheila C. Bair, Chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, has said.

The chairwoman has become the first top regulator to urge a legislative solution for the subprime problem, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

"The time has come for national antipredatory-lending standards," she said at a House Financial Services subcommittee hearing in Washington Tuesday.

Legislation "should raise the bar by strengthening protections available to borrowers" and be broad enough to cover state-regulated lenders, she said.

The House Financial Services subcommittee hearing was the second in a week on the meltdown in mortgages made to the riskiest borrowers. Regulators also testified Thursday before the Senate Banking Committee, where senators chastised them for not acting sooner.

Legislators called the hearings after delinquencies on subprime mortgages jumped to 13.3 percent last quarter, the highest since September 2002.

The late payments are occurring at a time of economic expansion and an unemployment rate, at 4.5 percent, that is close to a five-year low -- suggesting that poor underwriting standards are behind the problem, according to the report.