Can Obama and Bernanke get the U.S. out of the current economic slump without creating bigger problems down the road? Americans look to three sources for clues about the future of our economy: President Barack Obama, in charge of fiscal policy; Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke, in charge of monetary policy; and Warren Buffett, the revered “sage of Omaha” whose authority rests on his decades-long record of successful investment and whose popularity stems from his pithy statements (“Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money”).

The president’s policies are no secret. He has run huge deficits to stimulate the economy, first with a stimulus plan, most recently with cash-for-clunkers. The consensus is that these outlays have had a modest stimulative effect, and that other measures continued from the Bush administration have done a good deal to avert the collapse of several banks deemed too big to fail. Obama has taken deficits from their peace-time level of around 6 percent of GDP to a staggering 13 percent. As Buffett put it in a recent op-ed piece, “Fiscally we are in uncharted territory.”