Heads of the US Federal Reserve, IMF and OECD stepped up pressure on political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to shake off their inertia and tackle urgent economic problems.

If politicians ignore their pleas — including a blunt call from International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde to “act now” — the slowdown in world economic growth and debt turmoil in Europe could morph into a deeper crisis, top monetary officials and economists warned at an annual retreat at Jackson Hole, Wyoming in the US

“I hope they listen,” said Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer. Alarm over political deadlock was as obvious a backdrop to the annual meeting of policymakers in the wilds of Wyoming as the thunderstorms that rolled over the nearby Grand Teton peaks and dumped rain on the Jackson Lake Lodge. “The governance right now is not going through a very brilliant moment, I have to say, neither in Europe nor in the United States,” said Angel Gurria, who heads the multi-nation Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The signals that are coming out of the short-term discussions are, ‘We can’t even agree on about the time of the day, even if there’s a big clock telling us what the time of the day is.”

In the United States, the political impasse has thwarted moves to tame massive budget deficits which brought the nation to the edge of a debt default and cost the United States its coveted AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor’s. In Europe, leaders are fighting over who should pay for the sovereign debt crisis in the euro zone, which has a unified regime for monetary policy but whose member nations run their own budget policies.

Lagarde, whose appearance at the meeting was a late addition and reflected her sense of urgency, delivered a hard-hitting pitch against braking spending too fast as nations struggle to rein in long-term budget deficits. She was far from alone. The Fed has slashed U.S. interest rates to near zero and bought 2.3 trillion dollars in long-term securities in an effort to kick-start the recovery.

With monetary policy stretched to its limits, fiscal policy is now key, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke suggested. “Although the issue of fiscal sustainability must urgently be addressed, fiscal policymakers should not as a consequence disregard the fragility of the current economic recovery,” he said on Friday.