Washington ? Federal Reserve policy-makers and a White House-selected roster of experts convene half a continent apart this week to respond to a sputtering economy, troubling financial signals from abroad and a stock market whose massive losses have dimmed the future for millions of Americans.

But as officials weigh their options, they won’t find many, economists say. Washington has used most of its weapons for handling economic trouble and so has few left with which to act.

“The policy quiver has been depleted and, absent a major crisis, I’m not confident that we will use what remains wisely,” said former Federal Reserve governor and Clinton administration economic adviser Janet Yellen, now at the University of California, Berkeley.

“There’s no obvious silver bullet,” added former Congressional Budget Office director Robert Reischauer, now president of the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “We’re going to have to tighten our belts one notch and grind this one out.”

Federal Reserve officials gather Tuesday in Washington, amid rumors they will order new interest rate cuts. On the same day, President Bush stages a forum in Waco, Tex., that aides say is designed to highlight the economy’s fundamental soundness.

As Democrats took pot-shots at the guest list in Waco, calling it top-heavy with corporate chieftains, Bush noted Saturday in his weekly radio address that he also has invited workers and small-business owners for advice on what to do. He said he is “eager to hear from Americans from all walks of life, who are working hard to make ends meet in these uncertain economic times.”

Power of rhetoric

But the weapon of choice almost certainly will be words, not deeds. With its signal-sending federal funds rate at a four-decade low, the central bank is expected to issue a statement acknowledging the risks to the economy, but put off further rate cuts. The White House concluded several weeks ago that it had done most of what it could for the economy, and that its biggest job is convincing Americans that that’s enough.

Washington’s shortage of policy options is in no small measure the result of its aggressive use of tax- and interest-rate cuts and spending increases when the economy began to falter 18 months ago after a record-setting decade of growth.

As recently as last year, the Fed’s key interest rate stood at 6 percent, rather than its current 1.75 percent.

Most analysts think that the combination of rapid interest rate reductions by the Fed and at least the early stages of the president’s 10-year, nearly $2 trillion tax cut was just what the economy needed, and helped keep the country from suffering a longer, deeper recession than it ultimately did.

Blame on 9-11

The conventional wisdom and an explanation popular with the White House for why Washington’s early and aggressive actions have yet to return the country to steady growth is that they were derailed by the Sept. 11 attacks.

But economists have become increasingly impressed at how little the attacks affected the overall economy after the initial shock. If anything, they say, it is the subsequent violence in the Middle East and the threat of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, rather than the destruction of the World Trade Center, that have weighed on growth.

Recent revisions of the gross domestic product, which measures the nation’s total output of goods and services, show that the economy shrank during the first nine months of last year, and only resumed growth in the final three months.

If the attacks had less of an effect on the economy than previously thought, some analysts worry that the stock market’s long slide and the recent corporate scandals might be having much more of one.

No investing

These analysts are worried that, despite a small increase in equipment and software spending last quarter, corporate America still has not shown much interest in resuming the kind of capital investments that helped fuel growth and improve economic efficiency in the late 1990s. And without the investments, consumers are left to keep growth going on their own.

Consumers have proved incredibly responsive as the Fed pushed interest rates lower and lower, snapping up cars and houses at record rates. But analysts fear that the buying binge threatens to leave households overextended and especially vulnerable to real estate downturn.

But to date, the administration has been extremely reluctant to take substantial new steps. That appears to be in equal parts because the White House thinks the economy is on the mend and so is not in need of extra help, and because most substantial new steps would require the president to agree to changes in the 10-year tax cut that is his grandest legislative accomplishment to date.