A lack of long-term stewardship by company heads and shareholders is at the heart of the current financial crisis, an influential think-tank says in a report published on Wednesday.

Tomorrow's Company, whose previous research has helped shape UK company law, urges the government to understand better the effects of the growing "casino economy", where activities such as derivatives trading are often far removed from the real economy activity to which they theoretically relate.

The report warns against the search for scapegoats for the current crisis and says that it is wrong to attack private equity, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds for irresponsibility, noting that different shareholders perform different functions.

However, it condemns the practice of borrowing shares for voting purposes and asks if investors need to toughen up their engagement to change company behaviour or divest holdings in companies with particular shortcomings.

Mark Goyder, Tomorrow's Company founder, calls upon Peter Mandelson, the business secretary, Paul Myners, the City minister, and Lord Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, to develop their own "stewardship checklist" for regulating matters such as disclosure of short positions and remuneration of investors. "It's fundamental to the crisis that we have allowed a view to grow that we trust the technicians, risk assessments and mark- to-market values and we lose sight of what it originally meant to have ownership of something," he says.

"Now is the time when we should be saying we got it horribly wrong. What are the design principles for getting it right in the future?" The report describes a changing landscape of ownership, where not all shareholders want the responsibility of stewardship.

It warns that the "casino economy", if allowed to dominate the financial system, could threaten the survival of companies.

Colin Melvin, chief executive of Hermes Equity Ownership Services, an institutional fund manager, which sponsored the report, describes the current situation as a crisis of ownership.

"The people who are suffering are in part investors. If owners of companies had acted as good owners and called to account the financial institutions we don't think we would be here."

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